What's in an ABC Center? Alphabet Puzzles!

photo credit: mag3737 via photopin cc 

My district has several required centers for pre-k classrooms and most are the centers everyone knows and loves. Art, dramatic play, library, blocks, writing, math, science, technology. We also have a something called the ABC Center. Is that basically what it sounds like? (you may find yourself asking). Well, yes! It's a center designed to encourage exploration of the letters by focusing on just them. Sure, children are (or should be!) learning about the alphabet throughout the classroom and all during the day. This is just an additional way to ensure that children have great meaningful experiences with letters every day. 


So what goes in an ABC center? My first suggestion is something that is ubiquitous in early childhood classrooms: alphabet puzzles. Many look at that puzzle and see a few weeks of use followed by a covering of dust that grows each month, but this item can actually give you a lot of bang for your buck.


For example, you can start by putting the letters in a container and have them pull the letters one at a time from it to place in the puzzle. When they are finished, they put all the pieces back in the container. I like to start with an empty wipes container because they can't see what letter they're pulling out so it's very exciting and fun. Plus they're free! I guarantee you somebody you know can give you a baby wipe container.

Change up the container with your themes, with seasons, with holidays. Put them in a pumpkin in the fall, a basket in the spring, a dump truck when you're studying transportation, a big shoe when you're studying nursery rhymes. Find anything they'll fit in and go for it! It's an easy way to use that puzzle for all it's worth and since you are spending time talking about letters every day you will see those children start to say the names of the letters, think of words that begin with those letters, make connections with those letters, try to spell words with those letters.


Shari Sloane has some great ideas for alphabet puzzles, including one I'm excited to try out next year. She gets an alphabet die, one of the 30 sided ones with every single letter. Children roll the die and find that letter to put in the puzzle until it's full. My alphabet die is from an old version of the game Scattergories that was going in the trash at an old job. Always check the trash!


Put the letters into a feely box, bag, or empty tissue box and show children how to reach in and try to guess the letters based on how they feel before pulling them out to put on the puzzle. This is a great way to get children to observe the attributes of letters, which is crucial for letter recognition and formation. If I feel a straight edge, can it be an "o?" Why or why not? 


Get a container and mix an object or picture for each letter with the letter pieces. Children first put all the letters in the puzzle then match the objects or pictures and simply place them on top of the letters. It's not fancy, but guess what- your kids haven't seen a Lakeshore catalog; they don't care. It's fun, it's easy, and it's cheap!


Make some word cards to use with that puzzle. You can make them to match what you're learning or to teach high frequency words. Just remember not to choose words with any repeated letters!


Use a set of alphabet flash cards with pictures for each letter with your puzzle. Children pull a letter from the puzzle and match it to the card.


To incorporate writing, have children pull a letter from a container, write it in their journals or other paper, then place it in the puzzle. This is something I'd do after the class has had several months of exposure to the puzzle and to writing letters. I want them to have plenty of purely tactile experience with letters to set them up for writing. That said, when children are comfortable with writing letters this is a great way to get some fun practice.


If you want to get really snazzy, get a lowercase puzzle and an uppercase puzzle and mix up all the pieces in a container. Now students have to identify each letter as upper or lowercase before sorting it into the correct puzzle. 


Would you have believed there are so many ways to use a humble alphabet puzzle? I love items that can be used in multiple ways and levels and for that reason, alphabet puzzles score high in my book. The fact that any of these activities works for English or Spanish literacy is just icing on the alphabet cake!

Here are links to some of my favorite alphabet puzzles. (Apparently Lakeshore has discontinued the two I use most often, so maybe they are creating something new and even better.)

Foam puzzles like these are usually easy to find at dollar stores or bins at Target.

Melissa and Doug have great puzzles in English and Spanish and I have found all of these at Mardel:




-Spanish: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/Spanish-alphabet-peg-puzzles-educational-toys

-Spanish talking puzzle:  http://www.melissaanddoug.com/spanish-alphabet-sound-puzzle-wooden

-English: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/see-inside-alphabet-learning-puzzle

-English talking puzzle: http://www.melissaanddoug.com/alphabet-sound-learning-puzzle

Splash!

Two weekends ago, I was fortunate to attend Frog Street Press' 2012 Splash Conference. It's a mecca of all things pre-school, pre-k, and K, and it was a blast! I have several pages of notes full of great ideas I'm already working on to start off the upcoming school year, and plenty of books and websites to check out over the next few months.

I'll start with a great educator, Carolea Williams. You may be familiar with her products sold under the company name Teach Bright.  She has some awesome products for those teaching in an early elementary setting, but I never really looked closely enough to see how they worked. After seeing them in use I can tell you they are GREAT! The best part is that she isn't in it to get you to buy her products. She's perfectly happy to show you things she's done and how you can do them, too. (Now, if you can buy her stuff you should because all the activities include full color photos that all match each other AND are on cardstock!)

First up is an activity that uses photos from her Phonics Sorts book. (See how nice those pictures are? Obviously you can use any
photos/pictures/clipart you darn well please, but hers are just so nice.) WELL, one of the ways she showed us to use these is to get one of those small magnetic message boards from the Target Dollar Spot and put magnets on the cards. When you add the magnets you can use them all sorts of ways, but this way limits children to matching a few letters at a time which is great for beginning practice. And these boards are at Target right now! Just think of all the possibilities now that you've learned you can use these as tiny magnet boards in the classroom!

Another awesome idea she had was to create sorting mats that match your activity. These cards are from her book Animals, Food, and Clothes which are actually part of a series to teach the alphabet and beginning sounds, but look how easily the same cards can be used to make a completely different activity. These are just some of the food cards; again, any foods cards will do. I love how she uses the gingham squares to add a picnic-y feel.

And look what she uses for the cards-  a sandwich container! What an easy idea that will add so much to the activity. This can be used for any level. Children can start by sorting and naming the foods then move to writing the beginning sounds, creating a list of the foods in their picnic baskets, writing a story about the foods, or more. I can't wait to create some mats like this for different activities.

One of her biggest points was that when we're creating materials for center activities, we should maximize our efforts. This is something I agree with wholeheartedly- don't spend 3 hours creating something children will finish in 3 minutes! For example, with the picnic activity, you can switch out the food pictures so that children can complete it several times with different results. Here's Carolea's advice for creating your own materials- instead of making sets of 2 matching cards, MAKE 3! It's that easy! If you're up for it, make 4, 5, or 6. Her reasoning is that when you make a game that involves matching 2 cards, it's a one-shot deal. Of course, these are great for children to do over and over to gain automaticity with letter sounds or rhymes, but when you have more cards in your arsenal, it becomes a new game as often as you like. An example of this is rhyming cards. Instead of "cat" and "rat," make "cat," "rat," and "bat" and you'll be able to switch the cards out to completely change the activity. You can see how creating just a card or 2 more can make a huge difference in your prep time and the duration of center activities in your classroom. Once they children understand an activity, you are free to change up the cards from week to week without having to spend additional instruction time showing students how these work. Having all those extra cards also lets you differentiate instruction easily because some students can work with more cards, some with fewer.

Another great idea she has is to use craft foam for sorting. She'll cut it into strips and give children 2 strips if they're sorting into 2 groups, 3 strips for 3 groups, and so on. She also uses the craft foam to create mats that can be used for ANY matching activity- what a time saver! This is cardstock with the foam glued on, but she also does this in laminated file folders.

Using a mat like this gives children a concrete idea of how the cards should go together and lets them focus on the attribute you want (beginning sound, category, rhyming word) instead of spending time deciding where to place their cards. Know some folks who would benefit from that? Me too! When she uses the file folders, it creates a space for children to put their recording papers. She actually staples lots of the sheets into the folder and children pull theirs off as they finish, but children could easily use their own papers to record. The organization of this is something I think would help a lot of my children with recording what they've done because so many just don't yet have that level of organizational skills. This looks like a great stepping stone for them. 

Carolea Williams was absolutely bursting with great ideas and I'm so excited to use them in the upcoming school year. Visit her site to see all her great ideas- she updates her site from time to time with even more ideas to use in your classroom. More on other great stuff from the conference later!

Bottle Cap Letters

Like many of you, I've seen some great ideas for using bottle caps in the classroom. Something strange about me- I don't regularly drink anything that comes with plastic lids. Weird, right? Fortunately my very sweet assistant was more than willing to stock me up on lids, so I have a nice collection. A nice collection... that I've had for about 7 months. When I realized I've been wanting to do this project for nearly a year I decided it was high time. When I was finished and discovered it only took about 4 minutes, I felt a little silly for waiting so long. In conclusion, don't be like me- go ahead and create a set of bottle cap letters for yourself today (or as soon as it takes to collect 26 bottle caps)!

Here was my original inspiration. This is from a great blog called Growing in Pre-K created by Eilis Meyer. She has a LOT of brilliant ideas, but the one I'm focusing on today is what she calls her Caterpillar Alphabet which is made from Gatorade lids.

image: http://www.growinginprek.com/abccenter.htm

Things I love about hers: A) the uniformity of the lids; B) the size of the lids; C) the great alphabet stickers. For my own, the lids I have access to are smaller which is fine, but it would be nice to eventually do something with the larger caps. And as much as I like the 3D alphabet stickers I know these are not feasible in my classroom where they'll get peeled off within a week of hitting the shelf. So I decided on my own plan of attack for these guys, which I'm sharing with the world! The best part is that they really do take 5 minutes or less. 

Step 1: Gather your lids. Drink 26 bottles of your favorite beverage, have a coworker glug down some water for you, steal from your children, whatever it takes. 

Step 2: Get some alphabet stickers. I'm using these that I bought in the Target Dollar Spot last year. These are the perfect size to fit inside the lids to bottled water or 20 ounce bottles. The main thing you're looking for is that they will fit inside your lid. I chose to put them on the inside instead of the top because I think they will be more durable this way- less of a chance to pick them off. Only time will tell if this is accurate!

If you don't hoard collect stickers, these are available right now at Target. For $1! There are 5 pages in each of these packages which is a pretty great deal on shiny letter stickers, if you ask me.

 Step 3: Have your rabbit photo bomb the shoot and toss some of the lids aside.

 Step 4: Stick a sticker for each letter to the inside of the lid. I'm telling you, it really is that easy. Ta-da! You made a beautiful set of bottle cap letters.

If you're teaching in a bilingual classroom, feel free to add the fancy letters. You might need some slightly smaller stickers for Ch. Don't freak out about that letter being slightly different than the rest. Or do, who am I do judge.

Seriously, how easy was that?! Congratulations on making an easy tool you can use for literacy activities galore. Go ahead and make tons of them for spelling names or words, or make some with numbers for math activities. Then pat yourself on the back for paying a few bucks on these instead of pawning your worldly belongings for something similar from a teacher store!

Double the crayons

Fine motor skills are perhaps my favorite of the motor skills, probably because they give me a professional use for my love of tiny things. Of all the ways I incorporate activities to strengthen small hands, the writing tools I choose for my classroom have possibly the biggest effect since they are the tools children will use the most. Two years ago I bought a big package of golf pencils after reading a lot about pencil grip and handwriting formation. The main idea is this: give children writing implements that allow them to hold it their fist and they very well may do so. (Think the "fat" crayons and markers.) Provide tools that are shorter and smaller and they are forced to use a proper pencil grip. (Think golf pencils and those tiny pens you always want to buy in the Target Dollar Spot.) This pencil grasp is known in the biz as the tripod grip because it uses three fingers. Clever.

So back to the golf pencils. I absolutely love using them, plus you can find them free all over the place. A good place to stock up (make sure you ask first!) is Ikea. Last year I downsized my writing tools even more by breaking my chalk sticks in half before their first use. I put colored chalk in my writing center and also use it at my easel from time to time. The chalk gets broken quickly anyway so pre-halving it probably isn't even necessary. This year, I decided to get pretty hardcore and cut my colored pencils in half. You can buy tiny colored pencils but they aren't $1 or less at BTS sales. I enlisted my grandfather's fancy saw and chopped those puppies in half. Twice the pencils for your buck AND an excellent writing tool for the beginning of the school year! Sadly these little guys have already made their journey to school, so they are not available for photographs.

After chopping up my pencils my grandfather offered to cut the crayons as well. I'd just assumed this wouldn't be good for the blade but he said poppycock! I will share with you his genius secret for cutting crayons in half.

Just cut the entire box in half! Works like a charm!

Here are a few examples of the finished product. I realize I didn't put in anything for a size comparison, but I trust you can imagine half a crayon's size. The slight damage to the leftmost crayon wasn't sustained by the sawing, it's just a testament to how delicious crayons are to rabbits.

As I said before, I LOVE all things fine motor, so if you have any brilliant ideas for great writing tools please share the wealth!

What would YOU do with an Altoid tin?

After reading about several things one can accomplish with an Altoids tin, minimal crafting supplies, and some imagination, I decided to put out the APB for some of these little metal boxes. Using my trusty status update from a popular networking site, I plead for any of my 341 friends who partake of the Curiously Strong Mints to save their tins for me. A friend's mother responded with an offer to give me her son's collection from a period of his life where he was obsessed with Altoids. This was around 11 months ago.

Fast forward to last week. Yes, that was the time required for this transaction to take place. Don't judge. I went to my friend's house where the tins were being stored. I followed her to the garage. I was handed a box.

This is what I got!

Here's a side view.

But wait, there's more!

Total: 176 regular tins, 3 giant tins, and one tiny tin.

My first plan is to make name puzzles for each of my students. I'll glue their pictures along with their names on the lids, then place the individual letters of the name inside the tin. The trouble is, I'll have to wait until school starts to get their names and pictures, so I can't make them now. You can get an idea of what I'm planning here at at Jessica Meacham's Classroom Snapshots. While you're there, look around at all her names and alphabet activities- they're amazing!