Monday, January 13, 2014

Free Alphabet Activity & More Kindergarten Fun

The holidays are behind us, and kindergarten fun is in full swing!  Here are just a few of the activities we're enjoying: 


I was lucky enough to snag a fantastic pack of winter-themed kindergarten math activities on sale over Christmas break.  It was something of an impulse purchase, but it turned out to be a great decision!


Here you can see Colby completing a ten-frame matching activity.  It was great review, to refresh his skills after weeks of no school.  We haven't mastered recognizing number words yet, so it also provided a bit of a challenge.  (You can see his number line at the side of the photo; it has the number words written beneath the numerals so he was able to check his own guesses and complete the activity independently.)


Here's a look at the completed activity!


Here Colby is working with some clip cards from the same packet.


The two types of cards are shown above.  It was a great way to reinforce the concepts of "more" and "less".


The packet also included some great count-and-graph pages - these are just the two we've done so far!  Colban really likes graphing, and it's easy to extend this activity by asking questions about the graphs and providing simple addition problems.


This Missing Numbers Write and Wipe was one of my favorite activities.  (This is designed for all of the little sections to be cut apart and placed on a ring.  With only one student using them, I simply print the pages out on cardstock and laminate them.)  Colby is still learning those tricky teen numbers, and this is a fantastic way to practice!  We can just wipe them off and do them over and over again!

All of these activities, plus 6 others, can be found in Lavinia Pop's Math Centers - Winter (Beginning Skills).  It has 127 pages of activities, and it's only $6!  I feel almost guilty that I got it on sale!


We have also been loving these Number Sorts {Early Math Sorting Series, Set #1} by Andrea Knight!


Beginning sounds practice!  These clip cards are one of the sets from Rita Mitchell's Phonics: Clip & Record Cards product.  (60 cards, 3 activities for $2.50!  Great buy.)


Colby clipped the correct letter . . .


. . . and wrote it on the recording sheet.  Simple, effective activities are our favorite kind!


We had a blast with these free alphabet bingo cards from Sassy Sanctuary!  Hunter was happy to play with his little brother.  I shuffled a deck of alphabet cards and called the letters.  This is a really fun way to practice letter recognition, and fun for older kids too!


This was a simple, inexpensive activity I cooked up to test Colby on letter identification and sounds.  I wrote each letter of the alphabet on one of these little cups, then lined them up (out of order).  Each one has a little treat hidden underneath.


For each letter/sound Colby was able to identify, he got to keep the treat.  Very motivating!  He's eager to do better next time.  


I haven't done many stamping activities with my little nugget up 'til now, because the only alphabet stamps we had were decorative ones meant for scrapbooking.  I found some reasonably priced sets on Amazon.com; it turned out to be a good move on my part.  Colby finds phonics a little tougher than math, and he's not always in the mood to keep working on it.  Stamping is the exception!


This awesome stamping pages are from Rita Mitchell's Letter Match: Uppercase, Lowercase, & Beginning Sounds Centers.  Another fantastic, shockingly inexpensive product!  Her TpT shop is just loaded with them!  Also from this same packet:


These pages (meant to be cut apart, but it worked just as well for us to leave them intact) can be used with letter tiles as shown, or dry erase markers, play-doh, magnets, etc.


Colban really enjoyed these, which surprised me a little, as he was starting to get sick of alphabet work that day.


He liked the page I gave him so much, though, that he asked for another one when he was finished!  That's always good news, and I was happy to oblige.


See?  He's having a ball!  In case you missed the link above, you can check out these activities right here.

I'd been wanting a nice alphabet display for our classroom wall.  We have a poster up and refer to it often, but it only shows capital letters.  Obviously, this isn't ideal.  I'd found many free posters and display options online, but expensive printer ink is always a consideration.  Colby loved the ghostly number line we made on sentence strip back at Halloween, so I made something similar for the alphabet.  


Each of the cards Colby is cutting apart in the above photo features a letter in both upper- and lowercase, plus a picture of an animal that starts with that letter, to be colored.  Each day Colban colored as many of the animals as he wanted.  When he'd colored them all, he cut them apart.  He put them in order, and we glued them onto the sentence strips.  (It took three strips stapled together, with a little room left over.)


It looks awesome up on the wall!  Colby is so proud of having made it himself.  Each day when we sing the alphabet he uses a pointer to follow along.


Here's a close-up of one section . . .


 . . . and a closer look at the end as well.  We're happy to share these cards with you!  Use them to make your own alphabet display, in interactive notebooks, for flashcards, or other projects.


Leave a comment, and/or consider following us!  More freebies to come!

TpT Shops & Blogs mentioned in this post: