F is for feather, flower, finger prints, flamingos, firetrucks, firemen, fish, fox, fly, frog, feet, fork, farm and fall.
This is a great chart that we are using in our classroom to talk about the letter and how it is formed. The great thing is that it can be laminated and used for every letter or you can do a smaller version that you have for each letter if only doing one on one. It is a great format to talk about the letter.
With school and with my son, picking some books with each letter is very important. Some of our "F book" favorites are:
by Peter Sis
by Jonathan Londen
and all of the other great Froggy series
by Arnold Lobel
by Jane Miller
by Rev. W. Awdry and Richard Courtney
For a list of more F books, please look here.
There are some activities suggested on the Measured Mom website here. With my son we did lots of things including dressing up in a firemen's costume and playing a hiding game under the fire hats.
We also put together a firetruck floor puzzle from Melissa and Doug that I got at a consignment sale which we use quite often. It make a really big puzzle across a large part of the floor.
In the media table we had a fishing game. They are magnetic fishing poles and they can pick up fish out of the blue and green pellets. This is a big set from Lakeshore Learning which can be found here.
At home, we did it on a smaller scale with this fishing puzzle we had from Melissa and Doug. It was easier to use the puzzle but we also pulled the pieces out and put them on a blue sheet to represent the water. My son used the couch pillow to sit on an "island" outside the water to fish for them.
At school we made paper plate foxes with tissue paper and orange ears, two eyes and a nose.
We also made fall trees where the children used a bundle of q-tips to paint with and they dipped them into red, orange and yellow paint to make the fall leaves on the tree that they colored. You can see that they are all unique. It is also a nice F word to use a crushed up piece of foil to make these neat leaves.
There are some great resourced out there to print for free including the F monster from education.com website and many other F activities including tracing pages, puzzles and mazes found here. There is a limit of how many things that you can download a month but it is free to set up an account to get these great resources.
There is another site that is free and doesn't need a log on but it is a little harder to navigate. There is a letter in both color and black and white which has the letter uppercase and lower case to trace and then a word. There are also some areas for the dot marker. We bought the bingo daubers at the dollar store in every color that they came in and I can tell you that my son is almost 8 years old and I still find uses for them including his Book It Reading Calendar!! They are still going strong and not running out so he was able to pick out a color or make a pattern to make. Here is a link to all the letters.
The kids also did the fish book page that is going to be part of a book at the end of the year with a letter for each one that we studied so that they can have their own book. It is a lot like the one on this website and they provide the template if you want to make your own!!
At school, they also decorate the letters that go up on the wall with the items that start with the letter. We did feathers and finger prints and each kid put a few on both.
Hope that you and yours have fun finding all the F things that you can do because there are so many ways to add fun to learning about letters!!!
