And here is a picture of the two Jelly Bean worksheets:
For the first one, I cut out little kidney bean shaped jelly beans from construction paper. For the second, we used real jelly beans, which are usually pretty easy to find year round. I tried to stick with the colors that come in most packages.
Don’t forget to check out the rest of our Letter J projects:
Our construction paper project was making an island.
The island itself, in the shape of an uppercase I, is cut from brown paper. I made some little palm trees ahead of time (I free-handed those and they must have been close enough because my daughter knew what they were ;).
They we used some craft sand to represent the beach. You can sometimes find craft sand in the same place where they sell artificial flowers, or just in the craft section.
We probably should have tried gluing the trees down first, but my daughter was excited about the sand. We used white glue (not glue sticks) for this project, though, so that helped with getting the palm trees to stick to the sand once the glue below it was dry.
For our Letter Sorting, we made inchworms.
And watched the Sesame Street version of the Inchworm Song:
Then we tried to make marshmallow igloos.
This particular attempt didn’t work. We spread white glue all over a Styrofoam dome, and tied to stick mini marshmallows to it.
They fell off.
It occurred to me a few days afterwards that what we should have done instead was to slather the dome in white cake icing (icing is an I word!) and stick the marshmallows into that. That would have totally worked. And if I owned a dome cake pan we could have made a cake interior for our marshmallow igloo.
Next time.
Or, you know, you could just turn a bowl upside down and slather that with icing. There are actually plenty of options.
Either way, I would suggest having a separate (small) bowl of marshmallows available for snacking, to help keep the kiddos from eating the ones for the project.
You glue down some course salt or raw sugar and, once the glue is dry, add some watercolor paints.
We used kosher salt which was attached via glue stick.
It’s a fun way to play with texture. Just make sure you shake off all of the excess salt once the glue is dry and before you paint. That way you won’t end up with pieces of salt in your watercolor tray.
Oh – and this project is meant to represent an “Icee,” which is a crushed ice drink. Just in case that’s not a thing where you lived and you were wondering why I spelled “icy” incorrectly. ;)
I found this really cool ice cream shaped chalk at the dollar store, so we did some chalk drawings.
We often do practice our letters with chalk, but it was even more exciting this time around. :)
Then, we used our ice cream shaped chalk to trace around some letters we made out of sticks we found in the yard.
This was a lot of fun, especially since my girls love puzzles. I still have these in our Folder Games binder.
You can find similar things by doing an internet search, but these are a color matching worksheet with ice cream cones and an insect shadow matching worksheet which I got from Busy Little Bugs.
Of course, you could always use any type of sticker or stamp for these, or just make little sketches.
This was a map I found on a random internet search. There’s a very similar one at Free US and World Maps.
First we found all the states that began with our letter of the day, colored them and the letters in the title green, and then my daughter colored the rest of the map however she felt like it. (We also underlined the “island” part of Rhode Island.)
My girls love to do projects, and I love that they enjoy projects that help them with letter recognition, pre-reading skills, and a whole handful of other useful exercises.
The main problem is that I haven’t gotten around to posting about all of the activities yet. Or all of the worksheets that I’ve made for the girls. But I’m getting to it.
Today, for example, I’m sharing one of the Letter U activities that we did… even though I haven’t yet officially posted ALL of the Letter U activities and worksheets yet. But with summer ending, I wanted to get this one out there. It’s a great way to get the kids outdoors.
I cut two letters from a piece of purple foam and gave a U to each of my girls.
I showed them a letter U worksheet with the words Up, Underground, and Underwater. We talked about what each word meant, then we used the foam letters to demonstrate each concept.
They held the letters over their heads, then buried them in the dirt, and, finally, submerged them in the pool.
It was a lot of fun for them, and certainly memorable.
My kids and I have been practicing the alphabet through Letter Days, exploring one letter a day through food, games, activities, and worksheets.
I originally began posting about them on Squidoo (which is now HubPages), and posted about half of the alphabet there. But that site keeps changing their format, so it’s just easier for me to redo everything here, to start from scratch. Besides, I’ve created new worksheets and edited the format of the old worksheets to make printing easier. Not only that, there’s new stuff here you won’t find there – which is why I didn’t include the links to the old articles.
For each letter, I’ll be posting about activities and recipe ideas and also a list of all the free worksheets I’ve made. The worksheets posted below are all in PDF format and are free for home and classroom use – so enjoy!
What is a Letter Day?
I would usually spend one full day doing projects on a letter, or spread it out over a few days. Although even if we did just one Letter Day, we’d still continue discussing that letter for the next couple of days.
To begin each Letter Day, we glue a letter into our alphabet binder. We have two binders that are quite full, with all of the paper activities separated by A-Z dividers.
I almost always do at least two construction paper crafts that include making a letter into something (an H into a horse or a Q into a queen, for example) and a letter sorting activity where my girls need to separate capital from lowercase letters onto two shapes.
I do cut the paper down, though, before we do the projects. I make them 8.5″ by 11″ and then use a 3 hole punch after we’re done to help them fit in the binder.
I used to cut out the construction paper pieces ahead of time, too, and just let my girls glue them on and sort the pieces however they liked. My girls are older now, though, so they can cut more of the pieces themselves. It’s up to you how you’d like to do it, depending on the age of your children.
We also do worksheets that include tracing letters, tracing lines, mazes, color matching, letter searches, and much more.
Sometimes we do a traditional craft indoors, sometimes we run around outside and dig in the dirt. And we pretty much always cook and/or bake something.
But whatever game we play or whatever food we eat, we always talk about the letters. If we’re eating gnocchi because it’s Letter G day, we take the time to find the letter G on the gnocchi package.
We usually do collages, too. But not always, so I don’t plan on including them in each post. When we started, my daughter wasn’t able to cut out shapes yet, so I spent some time cutting pictures out of magazines after she went to bed.
The finished collages looked like this:
We used apples, angels, artichokes, and an accordion for letter A; a bison, butterflies, babies, and bells for letter B; and cars, camera, cherries, and cats for letter C. Now that she’s cutting out shapes quite well on her own, though, I’m considering starting the project all over again, but letting her cut out the pictures this time.
Plus, since my girls love being outside and drawing with chalk, we also practice our letters with tracing and coloring in chalk:
Most of these projects use supplies that we have around the house or that are easy to find. Construction paper is a biggie.
Here are some of the things I’ve mentioned in this post, including construction paper, a paper cutter, a 3 hole punch, and page dividers:
But where do I find all of these projects and worksheets that you’ve mentioned?
I’m so glad you asked!
They’ll all be listed right here and under the Alphabet Activities category. I haven’t finished editing all the photos yet, but they’ll be listed here as I post them. Plus, at one point my old computer died and I lost a lot of photos. So now my oldest is a great deal older when than when I started these projects with her, and since we’ve had to redo some of them for the photos (and it’s taken me awhile to get around to posting them) you may notice some age gaps between the photos of my various blog posts. But taking three or so years to post something is just an everyday part of #momlife, right? Right??
Anyway, this is the best page to bookmark (or Pin) if you want to take full advantage of everything, since this is where you’ll find the list to all of the Letter Day activities and worksheets.
Here are all of the free printable PDFs for the Letter M. They are for home and classroom use, please don’t sell them. Click on each title to print or download them: