Letter U Day

Today was the day for our co-op preschool to meet at our house. Our group does a letter a day and a number a day. Sometimes we also focus on shapes and colors. Today was letter U day, and also, the number 21.

As I was researching activities for letter U, I was coming up pretty short. There's just not that much out there based around the letter U. But the few things that I found and liked ended up working out really well, so I thought I would share.

We always start out preschool with "circle time." You know, weather, calendar, singing the days of the week song; I like to play a little I Spy With My Little Eye...etc. After that, we started right into our 1st letter U activity--which just so happened to also be our number 21 activity:

The Upside-Down Contest! 
The night before I had made this big chart with a place for each kid to record how long they could stand on their head or hands (upside-down). The chart measured all the way from 1 to 21 seconds. Each kid took a turn standing on their hands or head (some on a pillow) and the rest of us would count together. Most of the kids wanted me to hold their feet up for them and almost all the kids made it all the way to 21. When they were done, I let them color in their section of the chart to correspond with how long they were able to stay upside-down. The kids had a blast with this one. When everyone was done with their turn we could check out the data and make comparisons. Then it was time to read a book:

Up Above and Down Below, by Sue Redding

This is a pretty great book! The illustrations are wonderfully intriguing. All the kids gathered around and wouldn't ever let me turn the pages because they were so interested in the pictures. We made a game of pointing to a more obscure item on each page. Also, the book really helps give the kids a concrete idea of what "up" and "above" and "down" and "below" mean. After reading the book, I figured the kids were primed to display their new knowledge of positional words:




Positional Word Practice
I gave each child an object. I would then call out a positional word; there are an abundance of positional words to chose from but you better believe I at least started out with up, above, down and below. The kids would have to move their objects somewhere around the room to accomplish the positional word. I found it helpful to point out to the kids that they could use their bodies as a reference point. For example, if I said the word "above," the children could put the object above their heads, or above their arm, or above their foot. By the time we had exhausted my repertoire of positional words, the kids were ready for:

Play Time & Snacks
Not too much to say about this one. I looked around everywhere for letter U snacks, but most of them were way too labor intensive for me. So we just had fishy crackers and apples and chocolate chip cookies :-) We then moved onto some singing and dancing:

The Ugly Underwear Song
I found this song on the DLTK website and I'm SO glad that I did because it was a huge hit with the kids. The lyrics go:  "Oh I'm glad I don't have UGLY UNDERWEAR! (repeat) It would make me switch and twitch and maybe even itch! Oh I'm glad I don't have UGLY UNDERWEAR!" It's sung to the tune of, "If You're Happy and You Know It." I made up some funny dance moves, more like simple actions really, to go along with it and the kids loved to dance along, even if they didn't catch on to all the words right away. Very fun! Thanks to Becky somebody for posting that one! We kept the action alive after that with a:

Uniform Parade
We have a lot of dress-ups at our house so I let the kids pick out "uniforms" to put on. I tried to discuss the idea of a "uniform" while we were all outfitting ourselves, but I'm not sure the kids really got the difference between a uniform and a costume. Oh well. When we were dressed, a police officer, a fireman, a construction worker, a lifeguard, a farmer, a buzz lightyear, and a knight all went on a big parade around the house playing follow the leader. Everyone had a turn to be the leader, then we sat up to the table for our craft:

Letter U Umbrellas
Each kid got a worksheet/printout deal for the letter U. I used this one, but any other would work just fine. We used a cupcake liner, folded in half to make the umbrella top and glued it to the umbrella shape printed on the worksheet. The kids cut a length of pipe cleaner to match the handle in the printout and curled it up and glued that on too. We found out that pipe cleaners actually do not glue to paper well--I had to break out the extra extra strong glue to get them to stick successfully.

I had precut raindrops in a few different shades of blue that the kids could then glue to their worksheets. They also got a chance to trace the letter U that was printed on the printout. That's about it. By this time, all the parents were coming to pick up their kids, so some of the kids didn't finish and got to take the materials home with them.

That was our fun-filled day of letter U activities.

The end.