Fun Ways to Learn the Alphabet: Say G, with glee!

What comes to your mind when you think of teaching your child A,B,C? Is it the same ol’ A-B-C-D-E-F-G Alphabet song? 

But shouldn’t there be more to it then just a song or the monotonous dialog: A is for Apple and B is for Ball etc? Learning letters should not be a task. And by no means, should it be a boring task full of worksheets. 

There is so much more a child can learn through them. After all, they form the basis of the rich English language. Often we undermine and underestimate our children – we often think the child would perhaps only relate to “A is for Apple”. But in reality, a child’s mind is so absorbent that it needs ways and means to explore, imagine, learn and create in his own way instead of following a command which says “A is for Apple”. Well yes A is for Apple, but A can also be the tiny, hardworking ant and the fiery alligator. Writing uppercase ‘A’ (or a lowercase ‘a’) should not be confined to a tracing worksheet, but should naturally come to a child when he is given ample opportunities via fine motor activities, pre-writing works and tracing on sand or doodling on a chalkboard! With this in mind I have launched the ‘Letter of the week’ series making learning fun, hands-on, open-ended and child led. If you haven’t gone through the previous posts, you can check them out here – Letter A, Letter B, Letter C, Letter D, Letter E, Letter F
For now, let’s focus on this week’s activities :-). This week, we are focusing on Letter G! 
 
Here is an overview of our shelf for letter Gg works:

 
For the first activity, we decorated uppercase and lowercase letter G with Grains, going with the G is for grains theme! 

Application of glue:

Sprinkling the grains:

 Ta-da, beautiful artwork ready 🙂

Next we also traced the sandpaper letter, whilst reviewing the uppercase and lowercase letters:

We also reviewed our Letter of the week folder:

G is for gold, so we used some gold paint to fill in the circles of our “dot printable”:

Another work for the “gold” theme was a fun transferring activity of golden trinklets to the compartmentalized golden box –

I also set up a hands-on nature inspired work, since G is also for gardening! 

First, we spoke about how you can plant a seed in a pot before actually planting one 🙂 For that I created this fun printable (the links to which you will find in the enclosed video). 

 Practically doing it 🙂

 All done……now waiting for it to sprout 🙂

Continuing with our “garden” theme, I created a bundle of fun printables (available on my blog) that you can use to teach your child the concept of:

a. Size sorting (small, medium, large)

b. Phonetic letter sound – here the child has to match the fruits / vegetables to their respective initial letter sounds: 

c. Garden tool matching cards – This is a great way to introduce the child to new words and is a great vocabulary builder!

I believe children learn the best through books (and nature). So I love to include these two elements to the fullest whenever I can 🙂 For letter G, we read the very famous classic “The Three Billy Goats Gruff”. We also enacted the story with goats & troll puppets and a DIY bridge made of cardboard. I cannot tell you how much was this activity loved by my son and his friends.  

 After we were done reading and enacting the story, we played a fun bingo-inspired game on the book characters. I created a template, and asked my son to place marbles on various characters. 

 And lastly we did some fun clay work  – G is for gumball machine! We created colourful candies of clay and adorned them on the machine template 😉

I hope you enjoyed reading this post. If you want to have a closer look at the activities, here is my video link:

Until next letter, happy learning 🙂