Fun ways to learn the Alphabet: Say B, slow…ly!

Hello! Hope you have had a chance to try the hands-on ‘A’ -related activities with your child. Keeping up the fun quotient, let’s start with activities for letter ‘B’.

Again, I would suggest you to keep the activities child-led, and tweak them if required. Learning letters should not be boring and mundane. 
This is an overview of our shelf, but it’s entirely for you to decide what and how much you want to take up with your child.

1. As you can see from the picture, I have a letter B poster taped onto our wall. This is a fun way of visually practising objects starting from phonetic letter sound “buh”. 

I also have a letter of the week folder, where I clip a new letter sheet every week. This has picture cards of objects starting with that particular letter, in this case, letter “b”. The first sheet has black and white cards, and the child has to match the colored picture cards to their respective counterparts. 

 
2. On the top shelf, you will also see a salt tray – where we like to trace our letters. We also use a sandpaper letter for the same purpose.  This is a great hands-on way for the child to trace the letters in a tactile manner. 

3. We also like to practice our letters using dot markers and dot printables. These markers are difficult to get in India (I got them from amazon.com), so instead you can use pom poms, stickers, pebbles or flat marbles to fill in the circles. This is a great way to get an idea of the “shape” of the alphabet, and is also a very good activity to improve hand and eye coordination. 

4. Letter B object tray – I have put together a tray with objects starting from letter B. We like to go through each of the object, whilst emphasizing on their initial letter sound. 

5. Next, I have created a fun match up game of all objects starting with letter B using some flash cards that were lying around. I always like to use my flash cards in this fashion, versus just using it on its own!

 
6. We like to include some play dough or clay work on our shelf every now and then. For letter B, I helped my child create a boat. 

 
Using Play dough is a lovely pre-writing tool apart from being a great exploratory or sensory work! Its benefits DEFINITELY outweigh the mess
Those tiny hands and muscles develop so much strength and cordination by using playdough – by kneading, squishing and rolling it! 

We also created a boy using clay 😉

7. Next up, B is for Butterfly and my son really is fascinated by it. First we studied the lifecycle of a Butterfly using Safari Toob Figurines. These are expensive but worth investing in! I have found good deals on these on Flipkart over amazon. We also read our all-time favorite book “The very hungry caterpillar” – It has truly explained the lifecycle of a butterfly in the most beautiful way! 

The two-part letter B puzzle you see is a part of alphabet puzzle set from Melissa and Doug that I picked up from amazon. 

 
8. B is for balls – so here I have a fun transferring game of different ball erasers using a tong. This is such a great practical life work. 

Another practical life activity we did at this point was cutting practice. I created a sheet of different sports balls, which my son had to carefully cut and sort. This is again a great pre-writing and fine motor work. 

9. B is for Birds! Again something that my son is currently interested in. I had these Bird figurines / miniatures (bought from a local toy shop).  We created an outdoorsy scene on a card paper – drew some clouds, put some nature-inspired stickers, and placed our birds on this! We also gave these birds some grains to eat! So much for imagination 🙂

10. B is for band aid (ouch!) – I created cute, but bruised teddy bear printables and my son had so much fun pretending to be a doctor and putting a band aid on their bruise! 

11. B is also for Bugs – so I set up a quick match up game of bugs in a jar! We matched bug miniatures to their respective images. Again this is a free printable that you can download from my blog.

 And just when I thought we were done, my son picked up a bone which was a part of our letter B object tray, asked me to give some water, soap and sponge – and started scrubbing and washing the bone. And this I feel is the real beauty of Montessori – self driven works – where the child has ample scope and opportunity to unleash his imagination! 

So that pretty much concludes our letter B works. Through this series – Fun ways to teach alphabet, I am trying to humbly show that alphabet learning need not be rote and boring. Instead it can be playfully done in a way that is hands-on and in a way that helps the child develop love for learning. 
The video below shows these activities in action. You will also get the link to my blog in the video from which you can download the printables.

Have fun! Stay tuned to this space for activities on C next week. 

_{All pictures in this article are original and belong to the author. Reproducing them in any form without the permission of the author will not be allowed.}