All through the school year, we spend time exploring letters of the alphabet through different kinds of fun, hands-on, and interesting ideas. The goal is to keep the process of exploring letters and letter sound fun, meaningful, and simple.  This week we had fun with this simple alphabet review using the book titled, “the alphabet tree” by Leo Lionni.
I would say that this book is an excellent choice for children who are prekindergarten or kindergarten age but I have a mixed age group of children ages three and above. To make the book fun for my mixed age group, I simply modified the reading of the end of the book and it worked out nicely…
The book begins with leaves growing on trees and letters attaching themselves to the leaves.  Soon, the wind blows all the leaves off the trees and the letters begin to scatter about. The letters soon learn that they are stronger when they work together to make words or even sentences (which is where I did some simplifying in my reading of the book) and can stand up to even a strong gust of wind…
It has been incredibly windy here where we live and all the leaves have been falling off the trees in bulk. My students have loved spending as much time as possible outdoors exploring all the leaves and watching the wind blow them off of the trees. This book went along nicely with all of our time outdoors exploring leaves and wind and added a fun way to explore letters too…
After reading “the alphabet tree” we took a few minutes to retell the story with the use of my quickly drawn alphabet tree on a dry erase board….
Just as the letters in our book attached themselves to a leaf, I had letters come along and attach themselves to my tree too. As I added letters, the children shouted out the name of each letter…
And then along came small gusts of wind that blew the letters off of our tree just like in the book…
Each of the children took a turn choosing a letter to blow off of our tree and as they blew the letter, I would say the name of the letter they chose and wipe it off the board – “Oh No, The letter ____ blew away!”…
After the children took a turn being the wind, they were off to make their own alphabet trees using crayons, paper, and ink pads with alphabet ink stamps…
Because I had drawn a simple alphabet tree as part of our story telling time, the children understood easily how to make their own version of a simple alphabet tree…
The children drew branches and leaves….
Then began stamping on letters to create their alphabet trees…
We set out both upper and lowercase letter ink stamps for the children to explore…
A super simple and fun way to review the alphabet and a great way to extend our outdoor experiences with wind and leaves into the storytelling and creative process of creating our very own alphabet trees…
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