B for Ball

Alphabet activities
Today, Tot Club's letter of the week is 'B/b' and the theme is 'B for ball' (it was supposed to be 'B for bubbles', but I changed it to ball, as it's one of her favourite toys). As EV was already familiar with 'B' words like 'ball', 'balloon' and 'bubbles', this lesson was rather easy for her.


We started with the greeting song, and then worked on the 'b' feely card by pasting bubble wrap squares, during which I explained to EV the formation of the letter - down and round. EV was still repeating the formation for 'a' (round and down) at first, but very quickly was able to follow the formation of 'b'. The next activity was her favourite, of course - that of the phonics song for letter B. It was interesting to see her reaction when it was played. The tune is similar to the 'a' phonics song (in fact, the tune is the same for all the letters), and you could see the gears turning in her head, as though thinking 'this tune sounds familiar, but the lyrics are different. Why?'. But soon, she was moving to the music, and saying 'buh, buh, buh'. 


After that, we moved on to the images of words starting with 'B'. As you know, EV has been trying to exert her individuality and always says 'I do, I do' for tasks, especially when it comes to pasting. It was the same today, but I think she did a much better job than the last time. She still needed help in moving the glue stick around, and actually sticking the images, but she definitely has a better idea of how it's done. 


We went through images, with me asking her where each item was, eg 'where is the blue ball?' 

We then wrote the word 'ball' together. I also wrote the words for the other images, so that every time she sees this sheet, she can associate the respective images to the words.


I then wrote the word 'ball' on the doodle board and went through the sounds of each letter, while blending the sounds together. She's not ready to do any prompting yet, but it's still good to expose her to it to increase her phonemic awareness.


Art
For craft, we did a origami ball. Rather, mummy was the one who folded the ball. EV didn't seem interested in it, but when I blew to make the ball, you could see her eyes light up immediately. She told me she wanted to 'blow'. So I deflated the ball and passed it to her. She tried very hard to blow it up into a ball, but still couldn't figure it out. So I did it for her again. EV blew into the ball repeatedly, until the ball was wet with her saliva. At one point, she even got her Minnie Mouse doll to 'blow' the ball.

Our closing song was 'The Wheels on the Bus'. Here's the youtube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnupL42gmF4