Muddy Letter Learning

This past week we looked at 5 different things we can find "In the Barn" on our Farm Unit with Mother Goose Time.  The last day was MUD.  Now if you have been following along with my blog, you will know that my little Sweet Pea is not much into getting dirty.  Read more about her here.

I was super excited about MUD day and could not wait to see if she would be up for getting dirty or be a stick in the mud about it all!

Mother Goose Time had a great Phonological Awareness activity for us today!
Through this little activity, Sweet Pea focuses on small units of letter sounds such as "mmmm" for m.

The first thing we did was match lower case letter pigs to their uppercase mud puddles. Sweet Pea had no problem with this and was really good about making the letter sounds as she matched them up with out me probing her to do that. 

The great thing about these letters are that they are reviewing the letters we were exposed to last month in our Me and My Family Unit along with our new letters this month.

The fact that we are learning these particular letters instead of ABC order is wonderful!  It leads to a lot of CVC words, rhyming words, and blends.  For example, since Sweet Pea knows these 6 letters and their sounds, we can begin learning simple CVC words (consonant, vowel, consonant)

____at:  hat, cat, bat, mat

Now she is only 2 years old and 3 months.  She's not great at speaking yet, but for yall with older kids or very developed linguistic kids, this activity is great for rhyming---which is another language and literacy skill and goal Mother Goose Time incorporates through these pigs in mud!
Bet you never thought pigs in mud could do all that!  Me either....
Just take the A and the T to make "at", and then add the other letters in front.
  You could ask, "Which pig do you need to start the word mat? How about bat?"

It took her no time at all to match these pigs to their mud, so I took out the animal pictures that were also provided next for her to match to the mud puddles!  I loved this whole activity. She had pictures of an alligator, bird, mouse, horse, turtle, and a cow.

She matched 3 of them and then left to go start cooking in her play kitchen. 

But I still have this tray out in her play area and she still goes to it and matches the letters when she feels like it.

Just a little side note to help with Phonetics....

We don't have cable at my house, but we do have Netflix, and I have let Sweet Pea watch 

LeapFrog: Phonics Farm which has really helped reinforce the letter sounds and it's a FARM!
Does it get any better?!
She pretty obsessed with these dogs.

           

This is just the beginning to our MUD DAY!  Want to see some more hands on fun we had with Mother Goose Time on our muddy day and farm unit? Check out these posts:

Muddy Day Play

Watching a Child Create: Muddy Pig

Happy Learning!