Alphabet Puzzle- Toddler Learning Activity

I must admit that we probably let our kid watch too much TV. It has been sort of a crutch to fall back on since being so busy with school...and then since I've been out of school for 4 weeks....we've been using it a lot just to try to get things done around here. And with the new baby coming by next week....I have visions of lots of Word World and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for our future. :)

And I feel guilty about it.

I know it's not the end of the world...but to make myself feel better to be a 'better' parent (whatever that is)...I have been searching the internet and I also purchased this book.....

....to try and come up with more age-appropriate toddler activities. I can be creative at times...but when it comes to this, I have drawn a blank.

This book has given me so many ideas and I am really exciting about actually carrying them out. It's just been a process trying to read through the ideas...gather an abundance of supplies (to prepare for even after the baby comes)....and then just getting my 'plans' on paper.

But the activity I am going to show today is from this site: Children's Learning Activities. They come up with some great ideas and point out activities for several age ranges including toddlers (although according to my weekly Baby Center e-mail for Parker, she's a preschooler??). Like today...she posted about this Snowman Activity...I think Parker would love this....I just need to take the time to prepare it!

OK....so I'll get to this letter recognition activity now that I have written a novel!!!

It's called Alphabet Puzzle.

We have never really sat down and 'worked with Parker on the alphabet' per se.....it's like a few months ago she started pointing to letters and identifying them...and Geoff and I would look at each other like, "ummmm...did you teach her that?" Come to find out...we really think this is mostly thanks to Word World.

So since then...we have been more astute in just asking her to identify letters from time to time...she seems to enjoy it.

So when I ran across this activity...I thought she might like it, too.

I basically took some multi-colored notecards....wrote the uppercase letter on the left, and the lowercase on the right......then cut them out using my scrapbooking scissors.

I would only lay out 4 different letters at a time....(and we've only done this once). She was much better at identifying the uppercase letters, but could still do some lowercase. I think it might have been a little confusing for her because even though she might know the uppercase letter "A" and the lowercase letter "a" for some letters....when she saw them beside each other she kind of had a look on her face like, "How are these both A's?"

But this got me really excited, nonetheless, and I suppose we'll keep doing it! It's an easy activity that we can pull out whenever...and it wasn't too time consuming to prepare! I still need to cover with contact paper for durability, but that will come later!