Letter "V" -Letter of the Week Program - How To Run A Home Daycare

Welcome to letter “V” week! We decided to make our letter “V” craft into a vase with some flowers in it.

We read our AlphaTales letter book and practiced the sound of letter “V”. As we were all making the ‘vvvvvvvvvv’ sound, one of my three year olds exclaimed, “My mouth is vibrating!”

At craft time the kids made valentine pictures to celebrate letter “V”.

We made the letter “V” with long laces and with blocks lined up beside each other.

I found this neat book, Pilobolus-The Human Alphabet at the library this week. The illustrations are people doing flexible gymnastic type moves to make the shape of letters. They also included a picture of something that started with each letter. Here is the letter “V” page. They are making a valentine card in the larger image. It was quite an interesting picture book and it gave the kids lots of new ideas on how to work together to form letters.

Letter “V” turned out to be an easy one. The kids made the letter “V’ with their fingers, arms, legs, bodies and lying down on the carpet with a partner.

We made muffins this week and I choose a recipe that included vanilla. The children sniffed and stirred the vanilla into the batter.

Everybody loves the classic erupting volcano experiment right? We used this volcano model my son received as a gift and just added baking soda and vinegar.

The children thought this was AMAZING. If you don’t have a plastic volcano you can make one from plasticine or play-doh. We have done this in the past with our play-doh that is getting a bit hard and is ready to be thrown out soon anyway.

I suggested we mix some food colouring and make it look like real lava. The children wanted to see the volcano erupt several times. Hopefully they will remember we did this volcano experiment when we were learning the letter “V”. Experiences that stick in their minds helps children remember the letters within a context.

I served them some vegetables for lunch.

Preschoolers love to imitate and play house so I got out our toy vacuum cleaner. I left it in the pretend kitchen so the kids could vacuum the floor mats.

I told an interactive story for our letter review activity this week. This story was about a delivery man named Victor. He drove his van into the village every day to deliver letters. You could turn cardboard boxes into a tiny village and even into a van if you wanted to do a similar activity and don’t have the props necessary.

The children chose letters out of our fridge magnet letter collection. They said the name of the letter and loaded it into the back of the van.

Each child also added a velvet letter “V” valentine into the back of the van. I cut out letter “V”s from an old velvet dress that was too small. Each child received a velvet “V” before we started the story and we talked about the smooth feeling of velvet.

The children took turns driving the van to each house and having Victor deliver a velvet valentine letter “V” and a second letter. At this house, the woman received her valentine and the letter “F” for flowers. The children and I tried to come up with a few words that began with each letter. The letter “F” could also stand for; fish, fruit or a new fridge.

The children really enjoyed this game and continued to play with the toys after I had finished narrating the story. (They kids are all in pyjamas because we also do ‘theme’ days and today was PJ day.)

We finished our letter “V” activities by playing a game of balloon volleyball. I tied some skipping ropes together and strung them across the room. We draped a bed sheet over the skipping ropes to make our volleyball net. The game started with just one balloon but I quickly added a second balloon to give everyone a chance to have lots of opportunities to pass the balloons back and forth.