Day 9: Building St. Patrick's Day Words

Day 9: Building St. Patrick’s Day Words

Here’s the Little Miss working on word building. I made
snack-sized baggies containing the letter tiles necessary to build the
following St. Patrick’s Day-themed words:
· rainbow
· green
· lucky
· leprechaun
· Irish
· pot of gold

I had intended to use the resources on the PreKinders site
to print my own letter tile mats for this activity, http://prekinders.com/letter-tiles/,
but she happened across the baggies of letters and was excited about exploring
them, so we went with it.

I started by writing the word “rainbow” on a sheet of
construction paper. I dumped the letters and turned them over for her, saying,

“These are the letters you need to build the word ‘rainbow.’ Can you place these is the same order as the word ‘rainbow’- r-a-i-n-b-o-w?”

She immediately tried to line the letter tiles up below using one-to-one correspondence on the word, which didn’t work because of the size. She looked at me like, duh Mom, this won’t fit.

“Where are the empty squares to put the letters in?”

“We don’t have those today. What will you do?”

“Oh- I’ll just put them in the same order with no empty
squares.” (Crisis averted.)

After each word, I pointed at each letter and we spelled the word aloud together. We will use this activity again in a couple days to build the words, and then to find them in our St. Patrick’s Day book on a word hunt. Stay tuned!