Introducing Letter F

All the activities seen in this post are available in our Letter of the Week Packet for F. 

After a bout of start of the season sickness over here, we were ready to get back into our letters of the week.  Actually, Little Miss saw me working on the Glimmercat products and came over to my elbow to say, "That's my Glimmercat, Mommy!"  So I figured she was ready to get started on her next letter.

Here is our lesson plan for Day 1 of teaching Letter F, in our letter of the week program.  It explains the image of the letter F card:  Glimmercat is holding a flag and it is flapping in the wind and making a sound like "F-f-f-f-f!"

Which is a helpful mnemonic and mnemonics are usually helpful. 

Anyway, I introduced the letter F to Little Miss in this way, and then I gave her the Path of Motion sheet to experiment with.  First, she traced the letter with her fingers:

And then, I found some manipulatives for her to fill in the Big letter and little letter with.  This time, we used her brother's math bears and she lined them up with astonishing care here.

And then, she decided on her own to create a kind of pattern with her bears on the letter F.  This was all her idea, and I found it fascinating, and clever.

Normally, after introducing the letter F, I like to go over words that begin with the f sound.  Usually, on the first day, Little Miss and I do this with the matching game that is included in our packet.  It looks like this:

But today we decided to change things up.  Inspired partly because of a desire to change it up, partly by the recent sickness and partly because our printer needed new color cartridges.  Ha.  So, we chose this way to go over words that begin with F...

Little Miss really likes this Cut and Paste page.  And it is one that lets us go over each of the words together since the activity is not one that is intended for her to by herself.

After we talked together about the pictures and how each one starts with the F sound, Little Miss cut out the words.  Here, she is experimenting for a few cuts with the regular scissors.

They proved to be too challenging, so we quickly moved back to the scissors she is used to: the ones that kick the blades open after she squeezes them shut.

Then, before we glued the words over the pictures, Little Miss practiced writing her F's.  And then we finished it off together.

And then she was done.  And that's all we needed to do today.

Teaching Tip:  Remember, little ones don't need much academic time:  their play is still so important.  They'll let you know when they are done, and it's better, at this age, to keep the learning very fun and a together time with you.  Little Miss spends about 20 to 30 minutes each day with me, and that is generally all the time we need.