This year we used timberdoodle as the foundation for preschool. It’s been an amazing program and we’ve had fun. Next year I plan to use bits and pieces from timberdoodle; however, I’m completely changing up our language arts curriculum. That said, we’ve had fun and Snowflake has learned a ton with the timberdoodle curriculum. (I just found another curriculum that fits his leaning style a little better.) At the beginning of the year, Snoefkake knew about 6 letters, no sounds, and had little interest in reading books. Now, he knows 22/26 uppercase letters, about 10/26 lowercase letters, several sounds and loves to read and be read to. Following are the activities we do to help him learn and have fun in the process:
Foam Alphabet Dice: we do several activities with these. Pinterest has a ton of ideas.
Alphabet Cookies: there are several things we could do with these. So far we’ve mostly worked on identification and alphabetical order.
Books, books and more books: I’m not ashamed to admit we have a children’s book library of over 400 books. We read a lot!
Bananagrams: (timberdoodle) similar to the alphabet dice. We use these for uppercase identification and building familiar words.
Montessori Letter Work and Alphabet Puzzle: (timberdoodle) again these help with letter identification. We are currently working on the lowercase letters.
See and Spell: works on letter identification, phonics, and word building.
Letter and Picture Pairs: we use this to work on beginning sounds.
Alphabet Cookie Cutters: similar to math, we use these for letter identification and building familiar words.
Do-a-Dot Alphabet: he loves these. From Pinterest….
Alphabet Stamps: letter identification.
As you can see, most of our language arts material focuses on the same skills. However, having variety keeps it interesting and promotes retention of the information. We definitely have our favorites but the variety is much appreciated. 😊
Teaching a Snowflake 