Alphabet/Letters (Weekly Unplugged Project)
This week’s Unplugged Project theme was Alphabet/Letters. All the usual ideas seemed, well, usual. Picking up on a hide-and-seek theme proposed by my 5 year-old, I invented an Alphabet Scavenger Hunt.
First we cut 6 and a half sheets of construction paper into fourths making 26 uniformly-sized pieces. Math project anyone?? Then my oldest wrote the alphabet on the remaining half sheet of construction paper. We counted out 13 letters and made a line between the two sections. Each of my two children (5 and 7) was assigned half the alphabet to write, one letter per rectangle.
The children then hid someplace else while I distributed the letters throughout the main living area of our house. I won’t say that I really “hid” them, although some of them were harder to find than others. I wanted this to be part memory game too. I explained to them that they would see a lot of letters while searching and would have to try and remember them so they would be able to find them easily later in the game.
Once everything was hidden, I called the kids back and gave them a letter to find. They searched until someone found it and brought it to me. That child got one point. I used the alphabet list previously written by my oldest to cross off the found letter. This game continued with much raucous laughter and high-speed running around while I cooked dinner in relative peace (all I had to do was assign a letter to find, cross it off, and record points).
The memory-game aspect seemed to work as planned since the children found the letters more and more quickly as we progressed through the game. They loved it!
We will definitely keep these letters and play this again. Give it a try with your kids. The game could be easily adapted for different ages by making the letters harder or easier to find.
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So what did you come up with for Alphabet/Letters? If you joined us this week, please put your link in Mr. Linky. Mr. Linky has been a tad unreliable lately, so please leave a comment too, that way we will know where to find you if I have to delete him. I look forward to seeing what else is possible with Alphabet/Letters!
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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme is:
Music
You don’t have to compose a symphony. It doesn’t even have to be anything we can hear. Just try and think of something musically-related (however remotely) and go with it. Dance, sing, use some old piano books for a collage. Hey…the letters A through G are even musically-related! See how loose the Unplugged Project is? The key is to just have fun with your kids. Anything goes!
If you are at all interested, please feel free to jump in and join our project next week. As they say, the more the merrier!
Tags: "mom-ideas" that work for me, Activity Ideas, alphabet, educational/homeschool, educational/homeschool, Everything Else!, letters, Unplugged Project, Unplugged ProjectRelated posts
Posted: February 24th, 2008 under "mom-ideas" that work for me, Activity Ideas, Everything Else!, Unplugged Project, educational/homeschool.
Tags: alphabet, educational/homeschool, letters, Unplugged Project
Comments
Comment from Tamara
Time: February 24, 2008, 10:46 pm
Sounds like a great game idea. I think I will try it this week!
Comment from Tamara
Time: February 24, 2008, 10:46 pm
Oops! I forgot to leave a link to our project in case Mr.Linky lets us down.
http://mamatamara.blogspot.com/2008/02/weekly-unplugged-project-alphabet.html
Comment from Jeanette
Time: February 25, 2008, 10:29 am
What a great idea! This would be perfect for my son because he loves letters. Thanks for another super idea!
Comment from Heather
Time: February 25, 2008, 11:35 am
That looks like a great game. I am always looking for an acive learning game with my little guy.
Comment from Claire
Time: February 25, 2008, 12:07 pm
That’s a great idea. I imagine it would be very good fun.
Last week we joined the project late. This week it’s worse - we’ll be late and we won’t even have done anything original - we’re going to copy your game. Imitation is a form of flattery you know :-)
Hermione had her Bug Party yesterday so now I can quit sticking spots on ladybirds and get back to normality. Hopefully we will be back fully in the swing next week.
Comment from Kate in NJ
Time: February 25, 2008, 1:23 pm
We’re in…I finally remembered to post my unplugged post..lol.
Love your game idea!
We were in a very lazy mood around here, so we took it
pretty easy.;-)
Comment from coastalgirl
Time: February 25, 2008, 2:19 pm
I enjoyed everyone’s ideas last week…I wrote down a few for future activities. This week we were a little more on time since we are free of visitors for at least two days. Our alphbet time is posted here:
http://coastalgirl.typepad.com/coastalgirl/2008/02/alphabet-time.html
I really like the alphabet soup letter idea…fabulous!
Have a great week everyone.
Comment from Jenny
Time: February 25, 2008, 5:11 pm
What a wonderful idea- I love it! CJ really likes hide-and-seek, so I’ll have to try this somehow. Here’s what we did-
http://ilovepancakes.typepad.com/wildwood_cottage/2008/02/unplugged-pro-3.html
Comment from warillever
Time: February 26, 2008, 5:36 am
Cool game. We might try that in one room (I’ m not quite ready to have the four of them roaming the house yet).
Here is my link:
http://warillever.blogspot.com/2008/02/abcs-of-decoupage-and-clean-cars.html
Comment from Becky
Time: February 26, 2008, 6:30 am
This was an EASY week and I didn’t even do it! Agh! Life has taken me away. I need to make time for this again. My mother is flying down today from Washington state… maybe with an extra adult around I’ll get to it! Sorry I’ve been absent for a while.
Comment from Melitsa
Time: February 26, 2008, 7:33 am
What a great game……….hope I’m not too late for the party?
Here’s my link from an activity I love to do especially when I feel tired and beat but the obvious benefits mean the kids demand it all the time…. http://play-activities.com/blog/2008/01/25/play-with-stickies/
Comment from Diane
Time: February 26, 2008, 11:34 am
Howdy!
Love the letter scavenger hunt! I’m going to have to use that idea. :)
I posted about our mellow, simple alphabet project. We also made letters out of the pretzels we were munching on, but I didn’t take any pics.
Thanks for your blog!
Comment from Tomtemama
Time: February 26, 2008, 2:40 pm
I’m in for next week and you’re it! I tagged you on my blog.
Pingback from My Family Loves It » Unplugged Project: Alphabet
Time: February 26, 2008, 5:43 pm
[...] is our first time joining in with Unplug Your Kids’s Unplugged Project (and I’m a day late but a power outage messed us up yesterday). Her theme this week was [...]
Comment from Heather & John
Time: February 26, 2008, 5:50 pm
Hello, I am late but we did our first unplugged project. We did Jello letters, used paint and letter stamps and shared our letter book.
Comment from Mom and Kiddo
Time: March 1, 2008, 12:03 pm
I am a little late linking this time, since we were on vacation. I think Kiddo will love your alphabet game idea. Music will be a good challenge for us.
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