Tuesday Teachings - Alphabet Soup

Recently I was in a "big box" store and found some colored ping pong balls in the toy section. They are actually a game called Trick Pong Balls. I purchased two boxes since there are only 20 per box (they were about $5.00 each) with plans on using them for educational purposes. It is not necessary to but the sames ones I bought, plain white ping pong balls are probably cheaper but these come in bright colors. Once I got them home, I dug through my box of stickers and found the black foam alphabet stickers.

I put an uppercase sticker on one side of each ball and the matching lowercase letter on the other side. That obviously used up 26 of the 40 balls I had purchased. I took the next ten balls and put a number from 1-10 on each ball. On the

My son and I went through the alphabet balls. He would recite the ones he knew, along with the sound of the letter. The ones he did not know, I would tell him and we would recite the sound together. As we recited the letters, we would put each ball that we finished into my big pasta pot.

Once all of the letter balls had been added to the pot, I gave my son a soup spoon and he would scoop out one letter at a time and tell me the name of the letter and the sound of the letter. He enjoyed this tremendously for several reasons: 1) He LOVES to play with balls. 2) Each time he put the spoon in to scoop out a new letter, the spoon made great sounds for him. (Metal on metal).

After we learn all of the names and sounds of the letter I am planning on extending this game a bit. When he can name all of the letters and tell me the sounds, then he will also have to find an item in the house that begins with the letter of the ball he scooped out. We played this game for the first time on Saturday morning, since then we have played it at least twice a day. He loves it and sometimes he will even come to me with his chef hat on and ask to make letter soup.

Using things that interest your child (balls) to teach them skills they need give you your best chance for success.