Alphabet Boxes

I first learned about alphabet boxes here on the Counting Coconuts blog.  The concept is that you have boxes or drawers representing different letters of the alphabet and put tiny objects that start with each letter in the correct box...

I'm constantly collecting little trinkets for the girls in the $1 section of Target, craft store clearance sections and other places, so I've built up quite a collection of miscellaneous objects.  I put some alphabet boxes together for the twins a while ago when they had just turned two years old (they're now 33 months old).  At first they just wanted to play with the small objects inside instead of doing anything alphabet related (I can't really blame them - using the small cup and fork to feed the small animals is a lot more fun than sounding out words), but now that they are a bit older I've been taking the alphabet boxes back out again to work on our phonemic awareness and the girls are being a lot more receptive to organizing the objects by starting sounds..

An Attempt at Writing Letters - T

The twins (32 months) meet almost all of the Kindergarten readiness skills, except being able to write their names, so last week I started teaching L and E to write letters.  The plan was to work on writing at least one letter a week, starting with the ones that are easier (straight lines), and then going through until they can write the entire alphabet.  We started with letter 'T'.  First I asked them to form the letter (both uppercase and lowercase) from craft sticks, then we went on to some worksheets:

Magnet Activity Boards

L and E are 30 months old.

Sometimes I give the girls a big box of magnets to play with, but usually they just line them up on the cookie sheet or put them in containers (which is fun too), and ignore me when I try to make it into an organized activity. They do, however, love when I give them smaller-scale challenges on small magnet boards. I'll make up different tasks for them and keep it down to a reasonable size. For example, here's an activity I put together for matching upper case letters to lower case ones (the magnets are Mellisa and Doug):

If I tell them to match the uppercase to the lowercase letters they are not interested.  But if I tell them that the Mommy letters need to find their babies, then they enjoy this activity very much.  They'll even act out little scenarios -capital B says "Where's my baby?", lowercase b says "here I am." and then the Mommy and baby letters give each other kisses (they're only 2 years old, so this is about as involved as it gets). 

Here's another magnet activity board I put together, where the girls need to match each object to its beginning sound:

We're still working on beginning sounds, but they get the concept.  The other day, when L got out of the bath she said "I'm cold.. cccccc. Cold starts with 'c'".  These kids soak up new concepts like little sponges.

Anyway, these magnet activity boards are so easy to set up that it hardly takes any time at all to switch the activities around.  Since the boards are dry-erase in addition to being magnetic, I want to start having the girls draw lines from the objects on one side to those on the other side, but we're not ready for that quite yet.