Alphabet Pops

I got this idea from Pinterest (was there any doubt I would find it anywhere else :P)... originally the idea is from Kinderdi where they have shared pictures of the letter pops and some activities you can do with it. Here is how I made mine:

The materials I used were: Foam, Popsicle sticks, uppercase foam letters and lower case sticker letters (bought it from Michael's scrapbook section-they are chipboard letters) and hot glue gun. 

I cut out appropriate size circles and glued the letters using hot glue. Although both the foam letters and chipboard letters had sticky back, they would not stick on the foam, so I used hot glue. Then stick the foam on the popsicle sticks. 

The colorful letters make it look interesting and inviting. I did the vowel in one color. Although we are not really supposed to teach kids about vowels in Pre-K... I have some higher ability students who could understand this concept. So I thought no harm trying. 

We have broken these out in our classroom...right now we use them as a ticket to get off the carpet and get ready for lunch... I pull out random letter, point to a kid and he/she has to tell me what letter/sound. Kinderdi suggests using them in different ways-letter identification, putting them in order, sorting by colors. I made lower case...so they could play matching uppercase-lowercase! 

My next intention of using these are to put in alphabetical order- give each child a letter pop, then ask what letter come first (they should say "A")...ask child with A to come up, then ask what comes after B....and so on.Can't wait to try this game. 

Until next time,

Enjoy!!

Small Dice--Alphabet/Number

This was one of the first things I started making for my classroom. We have these small foam dice and students love rolling and counting the dots on those. Then I came across this dice template (google search) that is a free printable and can be customized. As a teacher and crafter I am all for "Freebies".... whether ideas or templates ;)

Kids love the idea of rolling a dice, waiting to see what it lands on so they can tell me....they are excited not only for themselves, but also what their friends roll lands on!! So I decided I needed to do more with these dice. I started by looking for Blank Foam Dice....found some in my local school supply store..they were like $5 for 2 .... and the bigger ones were little too expensive. So I decided to search for one and found this Dice Template .

Here is what I created with the dice template.

For the Alphabets dice I used Alpha Stickers I had (from my crafting supplies), hand wrote the numbers, and punched small circles for the last 2 dice. In the Alphabet Stickers I did leave out X and Q .... I know I need to include those letters...so I might just create a fifth dice with those 2 letters and 4 letters repeating. All the dice are wrapped with contact paper for longevity.

With the Alphabet Dice, I intend to practice letter sounds and letter recognition

Number dice is for recognizing numbers

Dot Dice is for one to one correspondence and counting.

To make these, Print out the template and cut it out to shape. Then go ahead stick/write before gluing the box together. For the first box, I put it together and then wrapped it with contact paper... to realize very quickly that I made it hard on self for no reason. Best way would be to wrap the contact paper on the template (after you cut it out) and then gluing it together.

Once you do first box, the others will be very fast and easy to make. We have used this template to also make dice for Math Graph Games and simple love using this template. Easy and convenient!!

I can't wait to use these with the kids... I know they are going to love it.

Until next time,

Cheers =)