Homeschooling with a toddler in tow: Fishing for ABCs

I am not a morning person… though I’ve worked long and hard at being pleasant in the morning and now we do our schooling first thing every morning. I’m still not at all a morning person though. And… I don’t like coffee. Instead, orange juice is my coffee. Orange juice is like sunshine in a cup and I love it! Yes, this has something to do with my subject. I’m coming around to it…

After many years of throwing away the frozen orange juice container tops I thought of a really awesome thing to do with them. Make an ABC fishing game! So it took a while of saving them up but when we had all  of 26 can tops we put alphabet stickers on them.

And on the backs we put things that start with that letter sound. F for flowers and fish… O for orange… W for worm and watermelon… and B for bee, bird, butterfly, bug, and bow. Just doing this is a lesson in and of itself.

But then, for the real fun, we tied a magnet to a stick with a string and went fishing!

You can see the baby in the background. Yes, I homeschool with a toddler and baby in tow. 🙂

Look! He caught an A!

Again, you can use this for letter recognition. I showed him a card with an A on it and then he had to find the A and fish for it. Later you could use it for the phonics sounds by turning all the “fish” over and having them find B by looking for the words that start with the sound “B.” And even later this is a fun spelling game. You could also use it for your older ones by telling them to fish for all the vowels or fish for the letter clusters that say “-tion.”

A fun activity that has a lot of applications! And takes some hand eye coordination too.

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