Fun ways to Learn the Alphabet: Say F, like fuh!

In this week’s installment of letter of the week series I present to you a fun, frugal way to let your children learn letter F. If you are new here, make sure you quickly hop over to catch up on the previous letters here: Letter A, Letter B, Letter C, Letter D, Letter E.

Letters are a doorway for children to explore the beauty of spoken as well as written language. But they should be introduced in a fun, no-stress, hands-on way. Most importantly, they should be introduced at a time when the child is “ready” and “keen” to learn. With this in mind, I have tried to make learning ‘Letters of the Alphabet’ simple and engaging for the little ones.

Without much ado, let me take you through the activities: 

During the start of our activities, we like to review the letter form (how the letter looks in its uppercase versus lowercase). At this point, we also like to use our sandpaper letter for tracing.  

We also like to use play dough for letter formation. 

Play dough is not just a fun sensory material, but also helps in strengthening those little hands and works fabulous as a fine motor tool! The malleable properties of play dough makes it a great pre-writing material, as the child learns to use his fingers to explore / mould / squish / squeeze the dough! 

Clay is one of the most amazing open ended tool for children which lets them be creative and imaginative! 

 
Ok, coming back to activities, we also like to use stickers for our works wherever possible! For this shelf, I had some fish stickers handy (while causally saying f is for fish), which we used to fill in the dot marker printable sheet. 

 
Again sticker peeling is such a great fine motor activity, of course besides being so much FUN 🙂

 Talking about fish, I also created a fun matching game for my son about different types of fish:

 And another fish themed activity was this DIY Lacing work – I had a fish shaped foam paper at home. I punched holes on its sides and voila we had a lacing activity ready 🙂

Lace on….:)

 I also used another fish foam shape as a counting mat – I simply drew 5 circles on it, and I gave my son flat marbles as counters / math manipulative. 

 As always, we also like to review our “Letter of the week” folder which contains picture cards of objects starting with the particular letter being covered in the week. 

 We also like to go through our “Letter of the week” poster where I like to include pictures of objects that children can relate and recognize! 

Next we I put together a Letter F Teasure basket, containing objects starting with initial letter sound “fuhhh” – like a fire truck, fire engine, fish, feather, fish, fishing net and number “five”! 

Needless to say, my son’s fave item from the basket was the fire truck 😉

 
…..and, the fire engine!

Next we did a fun “F is for Farm” work – for this I provided my son some fun farm templates to glue and paste onto a card stock paper to create a “farm scene”.  He also placed some of his favorite farm animal figurines on to the field! 

 Talking about farm animals, we also decided to study the life cycle of one of them! We chose “chicken” as we have the very realistic safari toob figurines to go along. I got these when they were at a discount on flipkart! These are worth every penny you spend. 

 F is for Fire Fighter – and to gel with this, I created a fun counting / math printable work!

 F is also for number 5. So we took out our pegging puzzle (this one is from Eduedge which I purchased from firstcry.com). I also added a clock to the tray and I showed my son how 5’o clock looks like (as he is currently showing a lot of interesting in showing / telling time). 

We also have this fun book called “Fuzzy faces” that I bought out on his shelf. The book has felt pieces (in shape of eyes, nose and mouth), and the child can make funny faces from it! I got this one during one of the Crossword Sale. 

 Since we are on letter F, I also wanted to show you our pets – Pinki and Goldie (fondly named by my son :-). They are kept in a fish bowl. (It is so difficult to capture them on camera, as they are constantly moving 🙂

 I feel Pets teach so much to a child in an unassuming, loving way – children learn how to take care of them, how to feed them, how to clean them! They also learn compassion in this process 🙂 This also is our calming corner – we like to come here when my son is in a bad mood, and it helps him to redirect his high energy!

I hope this article gave you some ideas, especially for the summer holidays! 

Catch the entire video here:

If you have tried any of the letter of the week activity at home, please feel free to share a picture here or, on BabyChakra MomStars Facebook group, with a reference to this article. I would love to have a look! 🙂

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