Princess Pea has been into learning letters for a while now. We don't really do anything to actively teach them to her, but when she asks about them we talk about words, letters and their sounds. One of her favourite mealtime games these days is guessing the first letters of words. She's pretty good at some ('b' and 'p' are the easiest for her), and others she's still far from mastering. But we have fun playing along.
This week she's been busy writing a lot. She tells me she's writing thank-you notes for the presents she'll receive at her upcoming birthday party (! Not sure if I should be impressed with her for being so thoughtful - and organised - as to pre-emptively write thank you notes, or if I should be mortified that she is focusing on the presents already!).
Anyway, she's been asking me a lot about the first initials of her friends' names, and trying to figure them out on her own as well. Of course, other than a few letters, she can't actually write anything recognisable. After reading this post from Christie at Childhood 101, to help Princess Pea along with her notes, I thought I'd make her some alphabet stencils. It seemed like a good way to connect her interest in beginning sounds and letters with writing her thank you notes to her friends.
Instead of regular stencils where you draw inside the letters, though, I thought it might be easier for her to draw around the letter shapes. She loves drawing around her hands these days, and was very proud of her ability to draw and cut around the heart templates we used for her Valentine's cards this year, so it seemed like a method that would appeal to her.
So I got an empty cereal box and wrote out the letters of the alphabet in fat block writing. They're not perfect, but they're fine. I cut them out for her to use as templates to draw around.
Even though they are so simply made, she's so impressed with them! She's been playing at writing random letters all over the place, as well as trying to figure out the initial letter of a particular word she wants to write, playing with the sounds on her tongue, then finding the correct letter in the set to draw around.
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