This lesson is part of a weekly series of home preschool lessons I do for 2 to 4 year olds. Click to see How I do Letter of the Week lessons.
This week we did U is for Umbrella which is very fitting for Spring time!
We always start our lessons by watching the clip from Leapfrog Letter Factory DVD for the featured letter and then making a letter craft.
The idea for this week’s letter craft came from here.
We started off by reading The Big Umbrella by Amy June and Jennifer Bates which is about an umbrella that is big and friendly and will make space for everyone underneath it.
Then we did these two learning activities:
and
Afterward we read Singing in the Rain illustrated by Tim Hopgood which follows the lyrics of the famous song as a group of kids goes through the rain together. It is full of vibrant illustrations and the colorful umbrellas really stand out so it was fun for the kids to point them out on each page.
After reading the book we did an activity on the whiteboard with ten little umbrellas and ten little raindrops props I made. My older son helped me color them and then I laminated them and put magnetic tape on the back.
We sang this song as we counted and moved the umbrellas and raindrops. And then I had them do different tasks that they had to follow my directions for (like “put the raindrop over the red umbrella,” “put raindrops over 5 umbrellas,” etc).
The next book we read was Ella’s Umbrellas by Jennifer Lloyd. It is about a girl who loves umbrellas and has built up quite a collection. When her mom tells her she needs to give some away she is resistant at first, but then she starts to find other people who might need them. There were many different types of umbrellas in the story that the kids liked to look at and talk about which they liked best.
To go along with the book we did this craft of using cupcake liners cut in half to make umbrellas.
We also used our Do a Dot Makers to practice making the letter U. I often just copy the letter sheet out of our Do a Dot coloring book.
For our snack I made little orange and veggie straw umbrellas.
We always end the lesson with reading Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and adding the letter to our coconut tree.
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