2 year old super genius, freebies and a flash give-a-way!

Happy Fall Y'all!! I loooove this time of year. It really is my favorite, Christmas is a close second. I love pumpkins, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and fall leaves (even though in Texas our leaves stay green and don't fall off until January). I'm so excited to go trick-or-treating with baby Jackson for the first time. Well, we went last year, but honestly how much fun can a 1 month old have trick or treating? This year he will actually get to participate...so excited!

Alright, down to business. A week ago I started tutoring my 2 year old (23 month old) nephew Hank. He is SO adorable and he is ridiculously smart. He knows all of his capital letters and their sounds and he isn't even 3 yet. I remember teaching kinder and my most struggling students barely knew any letters at all. I'm so excited for Hank and so are his parents. 

We've been doing 30 minute sessions where we are reviewing letters and sounds and starting to associate lower case letters with the capitals. We started by playing a game called "Gobble Gobble". It's similar to other games like "POP" or "Oops" whatever you want to call it really. You cut out all the cards and put in some cards that have a turkey on them. Each player takes turn pulling out a card and saying the name of the letter and it's sound. If they get a turkey, they have to jump up and say "Gobble, gobble, gobble" and they lose their cards and start over. The person with the most cards at the end is the winner.

Here are the cards if you want to use them for a center or small group activity. Kids LOVE jumping around like turkeys...but of course as a teacher you know this already! :)

After we warmed up we worked on capital and lowercase letter A. He knows capital A no problem, it's the lowercase that tricks him up, especially how different fonts can make the a look so different. We are starting off basic, same font for a while but once he has more exposure to different lowercase letters I'll start exposing him to the funky fonts and teach him how to decipher.

Here he is working on the A practice page. Now that I know more about his fine motor skills I think he can tear paper easily enough to wear we can tear construction paper and cover the A to make it a more tactile experience for him. This day he just traced it with a chubby crayon, keep in mind he is 2! Not 5. He's just a smarty pants.

We are also working on learning sight words. We called them "popcorn words" in kinder so I'm keeping with that tradition. I made him a little A book with two words per page and a simple picture. The sight word we learned this day was "an" and I had him go through his book and circle the lowercase As, then we went through and put "butter" on the word "An". We didn't have a yellow crayon so we used orange. I used to tell my kids to "butter up" their popcorn words by coloring them in yellow. I also made him a piece of popcorn with the word "an" on it that we are keeping in a little baggy for him to practice with at home. 

Hank also worked on a page where he circled the pictures that started with A and then had to circle all the capital and lowercase As. The lowercase was hard for him. Especially the Q! It was a good learning experience though as we started learning the different formations of letters. I talked with him about how Q has a tail and a doesn't . 

To wrap it up we played a letter sound game I bought a Lakeshore. I picked some lowercase letters that look very similar to capitals to help him associate them easily. He was able to tell me where the pictures went according to their beginning sound. Ummm he's awesome. I know! I gave his mom (my big sister) a CD with rhymes because I also want him to start learning how to rhyme, we will get into that later down the road. I'm so excited to get to teach this little brainiac! 

Here are the A pages I made. Next week we are working on B. I'll post those for free too if you want to use as send home work or small group intervention for kids in your class. As we work through the alphabet I'll tweak things here and there but I'm planning on making this a huge ABC/Sight word unit to share with y'all down the road. Hank is my little guinea pig! :)

Alright, flash give-a-way! I just finished a Halloween themed measurement unit for my kinder friends. This unit covers Common Core math for kinder (K.MD.A.1, K.MD.A.2) and the Texas TEKS (K.7A, K.7B, 1.7A,1.7D). Here are some pics:

These math stations would be great to use that week of Halloween. Kids love anything and everything Halloween!! This unit was created for kinder but could be used in a first or second grade room as a review of basic nonstandard measurement skills. I've included picture visuals for directions and vocabulary posters. You can pick it up in my TPT store here. I'm also giving away one of these units to the first reader who comments on this blog post! Good luck!! (If you don't teach kinder-second, you can choose my monster mash writing unit instead which works for grades 1-3.)

All blog comments get sent to me for approval first, so you won't see your comment pop up right away. I'll announce the winner later today! Happy Wednesday y'all! :)