This week continuing on our journey to reading this summer, we went outside to review (& learn) upper and lowercase letters!
A Mom with a Lesson Plan (check out her new look, oolala!), is sharing easy ways to read 20 minutes a day today, so be sure to pop over and get those tips!
No Time for Flash Cards recently posted about 4 ways to learn letters on your sidewalk. I took that idea with the random letters all over the driveway and made it a learning activity for upper and lowercase letters for the kids!
There’s just a little bit of prep for this activity: I wrote letters in both upper and lowercase letters on my driveway, randomly, all over the place… and big too! The boys thought this was hilarious for some reason and tagged along behind me the whole way through the alphabet. I was going to stop about half way through the alphabet, but Henry pushed me to finish.
Please disregard my sandy driveway… the boys tend to drag it all over from their sandbox.
I started this activity in a different direction that it ended up in. Both I think are fine activities, but the latter was much more successful with the boys for the entire time.
At first, I had the boys try to match up the upper and lowercase letters by drawing a line from a uppercase to the lowercase letter. I named a letter, A, and George would find the uppercase. Henry would then go find the lowercase match, a (since this is review for him and George isn’t quite there yet, he knows some). And they would take turns drawing a line to connect the two.
This was fun for about 6 or so times. I think we made it through H (I guess that’s 8) and then the boys had enough. It is kind of hard to draw on our driveway (that may be because of all that sand…) so that could have played a part.
I then decided to fill up water bottles and have them squirt the letters. I gave George control of the letter. He’d go find a uppercase letter and tell Henry what it was so Henry could find the lowercase match. This was a hit!
They did this over and over until all the letters disappeared! (Yay! A fun way to clean it up too!)
I was filling water bottles up right and left (definitely going to find bigger bottles next time!). George would use an entire bottle on each letter! I ended up grabbing a spare water bottle for him so I was swapping them out so they could keep going.
Other ideas to learn (besides upper and lowercase letters) like this on the sidewalk:
- Make them numbers and groups of dots to match up
- Spell out words for beginning sight word readers!
- Match up two of the same sight words.
- Match up two uppercase letters for beginning letter learners.
- Draw shapes and match a square to a square! (Maybe make sets of each in different colors)
If you have a kid learning or need to review their upper and lowercase letters, try out some of the activities in that section of the 50 Activities to learn their ABCs!