Letter N: Going Nuts!

I love nuts! We’ve got plenty around the house, thus I decided to come up with activities for Vito since he’s been seeing them around the house and loves to play with my walnuts.

Letter N Object Basket.  Reinforce literacy, letter ‘n’ symbol and phonics,  vocabulary, and verbal skills.  In the basket we have: nine, upper and lowercase N/n, necktie, DIY sandpaper ‘n’, nuts.

Hammering Peanuts.  This is a practical life activity that develops hand and eye coordination, and develop those hand and arm muscles.  I first set it up in a tray, but the peanuts were slipping so I had to put cling film to hold them. Vito loves physical activities so he enjoyed this. The only drawback is that the hammer that we used were so tiny  

Letter N Craft.  I always make sure to include crafts in our weekly activities.  My main goal here is for Vito to practice his manual dexterity like squeezing the glue, picking up small objects or pencils.  Now that he’s familiar with glue, I gave him a glue with small opening for him to squeeze it. 

Here he is applying peanut shells on the letter N. Improves pincer grasp through picking up small objects.  Note to parents: always supervise your children when dealing with small objects. 

Color Green. I’m introducing letter green this week.  I gathered a few objects from his toys and place them all in a basket. 

And we painted green in an A3 paper.  Working with one color a week works for him.

When they dried up, we place them on the wall for everyday viewing.

Nut Matching. For visual discrimination (difference in objects), widen vocabulary and concentration.

Counting Walnuts.  Builds early number and counting skills.

Forming Shapes using Nuts.  Teaches shapes, fine motor skills and hand/eye coordination. This is Vito’s idea!  I made a circle using the walnuts then he took the circle puzzle and place it in the middle, matching them together. Brilliant!  We practice some more by drawing shapes on a piece of paper and he would trace the line using the peanut shells to form the shape. He enjoyed it!

And that’s about it! And what I happened to the nuts? I’m still consuming them LOL. 

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Exploring Fruits for Toddlers

Vito is 23 months old. 

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After, the zoo, farm animals and parts of the body, I decided to do a fruit unit for this little boy as he loves to name fruits whenever we are in the supermarket.  I like to come up with themed activities as it helps the child to expand their knowledge of certain objects and occasions, practice communication skills and improve their vocabulary.

 

Beginning Sounds. We’re using Hape Lowercase Puzzle.

Apple Prints. Color recognition and sensorial activity.

Bagging Fruits. A practical life activity that develops hand/eye coordination, concentration plus helping Mommy tidy up!  We’re using Learning Resources Fruit Counters.

Matching Real Objects with Pictures. Developing early discrimination skills (difference between objects), hand/eye coordination and concentration.  I made the fruit cards and you can get a copy from here or here.

Fruit Color Sorting using a Tong. Improving fine motor skills, pincer grasp, concentration and color recognition.

I love this tong from Ikea. 

As of the moment, our color sorting activity involves two colors, but I introduce one (new) color at a time.

He’s seriously concentrating.  Goodness!

Slicing a Banana. I was with him the whole time he’s doing this, reason why I don’t have an actual photo of the activity.  Another great practical life activity to introduce to kids.  This is an introductory activity of actual “slicing”, though we’ve done a lot of this using playdough.  He still has difficulty coordinating his hands.  We’ll get there though… need to practice more

And that’s about it! Thanks once again for taking time to read through the post.  Don’t forget to PIN this for your reference.

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Letter 'c' Sound Activities

This was a fun and quick set activities.  We basically finished all of these in a week.

Letter 'c' sound basket.  Our object basket was composed of a carrot, a toy red car and a cow animal figure.  The foam letter is from Munchkins Foam Bath.

Letter 'c' craft. I made Vito colour the letter c using our Do-a-Dot markers (which he really really loves by the way).  Afterwhich, I made him watch Mavi cut the letter and turn it into a letter c carrot.

C for colours.   This is again another colour matching activity I prepared for Vito.  The cups were from the local store and the cubes were from  Melissa & Doug Lacing Beads learning toy.  We do this activity everyday for Vito to know his colours.

C for cottons.  We tried this activity, painting using cotton balls but Vito was horrified of the cotton.  So we proceeded with finger painting instead.  We are using Giotto Bebe Fingerpaints at home.

Playing with pegs (pretend corns).  We played around with favourite FantaColor pegs and Vito is getting better fitting those smaller pegs into the hold

Steamed carrots.  Vito's snack for the entire week LOL.

C for cars.  We played with cars every morning and matched them to our homemade colour cards.  Read about it here.

Books this week:

• Caps for Sale
• The Carrot Seed
• BigCats Phonics From Cow to Carton Milk
• That's not my Car

You can also purchase these books from Book Depository, shipping is free!

Photos of Vito working.

More letter sound activities coming up in the next few weeks!

Thank you for taking time to read this post! Don’t forget to pin it for later.

Why not try reading our Letter ‘a’ Sound activities?

 Our Letter ‘b’ Sound activities might interest you as well!

Teaching Colors With Cars

Making the most of Vito’s interest in cars, we played this colour matching game. This is an example of “follow the child”.  Observe your child’s interest and use that in you advantage lol. 

You see Vito knows his shapes and can identify objects, but I’m not really sure with his colours .  This is the reason why I do colour activities everyday.  And as much as I want to push him, colour activity is not really his type.  So I was wondering if we could do colour matching and play cards at the same time.

Oh boy it was a total hit!

Cars and Cards

Presentation:

I suggest start the presentation slowly. It’s like saying “Vito, this car is red.  This card is also red.  So I’m going to put them together here.” 

Observations:

I wanted to present three colours only (red, blue and yellow) but he took out the rest of the cards and gave it to me (a sign!).  So I proceeded with the other colours.  After the presentation he started playing with the cars, making sounds and gestures. While he is at it, I asked him to show me a car according to the colour I  will mention.  In the picture below I asked him for a blue car, and he pointed correctly on the car.  I asked him for a yellow car, but he ignored me and continue playing with the blue car.  If that’s the case, let him be.  No pressure. The point here is exposing the child to colours, not pushing them to know it instantly.

Cars and M&D Latches Board

Presentation:

He loves this toy, so I used it as a tool in teaching colour as well. Here I was telling him a story that the cars need to go home, and they have to go to the doors of which they matches their colours.

Observations:

He listened all throughout the presentation (I guess he loves the story), but ignored me whenever I ask him to give me a certain coloured car.  He was too busy playing opening and closing the doors, while moving the cars in any directions.

Well this was a nice attempt of teaching Vito colours.  We’ll be doing this frequently, as he loves playing with cars as of the moment

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Letter ‘b’ Sound Activities

Sorry, this has been a late post. I was busy for the past few days and could not find the time to share this. 

So this is a continuation of our Letter Sound of the Week activities.  Right after letter a, we moved on to letter b, just in time to feed Vito’s obsession of balls. It took us two weeks to finish this. And note that we don’t do this the whole day! It would only take about 10-15 minutes for each activity, excluding my preparation time of course.  Sometimes, preparation times takes like forever, while the actual activity would last only a minute. That is, if my Vito doesn’t feel like doing it at all. So what I do is put the tray back in the shelf and try again the next day, when he’s in the mood.

Letter ‘b’ basket sound.  Our basket contains a mini book of Dr. Seuss, given to us by Emirates, a block (soft block), and banana.  What we do with this basket is that everyday, I would present it to him and mention all the name of the objects.  We play it over and over so he will remember the words.

Note:  The basket is really really helpful.  I suggest that you should do this as well. Objects shouldn’t be fancy, just look around your house and see what you can find.

I later on added animal figures: bird and butterfly, our Playskool barrel , DIY sandpaper letter and Melissa and Doug Magnetic Letter.

       

Letter ‘b’ craft.  This was a collaborative work for both Vito and Mavi.  Xavi did all the scribbling in our letter, Mavi designed Vito’s hand prints for the butterfly’s wings.

Note:  Since Vito can’t participate in this one yet, I love asking Mavi to show his brother how to do this.  I think this is the best way of showing his little brother how to do things, like gluing and cutting.  This is also a great activity for both brothers to bond.

 

Balls! This was Vito’s favourite object as of the moment and we’ve been playing balls whenever we can (both indoor and outdoors).

Note:  Oh yeah, this has been a favourite toy and activity so far.

Eating and playing bananas. Again, I always use familiar objects for Vito whenever we do our letter sound of the week. Vito eats banana during breakfast so this wasn’t new to him. I let him eat on his own and give him fork so he can practise picking up the banana slices using a utensil. For the other tray, those are banana counters from Learning Resources.  The object of this activity is 1:1 correspondence, that is putting a piece of banana in each hole (this is an ordinary ice tray).  We count as we put the banana in place.

Note:  Vito loves eating, and it is best to incorporate letter sound activities with food as this will help them familiarize with the sounds more easily.

Soft blocks play.  We love these blocks!! These are soft blocks I got from Amazon last year.  Vito loves to stack and squeeze them.

Note:  I highly recommend these soft blocks.  The colours are vibrant and aside from the ones I mentioned, Vito loves touching and feeling all those moulds on the sides.

Bird crafts.  I realized that kids as young as 18 months, can now be exposed to crafts.  This was an assisted activity.  I placed glue on the bird’s wings and made Vito put the feathers on it.  He loves touching the glue more than feeling the feathers.

Creating sound with bells. We started using my Vilac Rhythm Bells.  At first he couldn’t make a sound, but finally created a soft tone when I showed him how to ring it.  I also used this activity to introduce loud and soft sounds.

Bear colour sorting.  Bear counters for colour sorting.  I continually give Vito this kind of sorting activities to expose him to colours. He can identify objects, but it is still a hit or miss with colours. 

 

The bear counters are from Learning Resources.  You can also use buttons.

Books for letter ‘b’.

• BigCat Phonics “Birds”
• Mr. Brown Can Moo.
• Brown Bear Brown Bear
• Baby’s First Animals.

You can all these books from Book Depository as well.  They ship for free anywhere!

We read the books every morning. Not all.  Mostly we can read as much as three books but mostly two books in the morning and two books in the afternoon.

See these in action!

And that’s about it! I hope you enjoy this post as I love sharing these.  Stay tuned for our letter ‘c’ in the next few weeks! Don’t forget to check our letter ‘a’ sound as well.

Oh and don’t forget to pin this activity, so you won’t forget it!

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