Eating The Alphabet

"Eating The Alphabet" by Lois Ehlert

Eating The Alphabet by Lois Ehlert is a colorful ABC book that encourages your sweeties to learn new vocabulary as well as phonics and letter identification.  Let me be completely honest when I tell you that my kids really are into this book up to about letter K.  Then the wiggles start.  You know what I mean.  Sally starts touching Sarah's hair, Billy starts poking Carole, etc.  It's a long book.

So, this year, when I was preparing to use this book with a kindergarten class, I got smart.  I went to the grocery store and bought dates, a kiwi, and peaches.  I actually wanted mangoes, but the particular store that I went to didn't have any.  I also prepared a CD with alphabet songs on it, to get the kids up and moving.  When the students came in, I started with a song by Dr. Jean called "Phonercise."  This is such a wonderful song because it has the kids stretching up to say the letter, touching their shoulders to make the letter sound, and touching their toes to say a word starting with that letter.  I paused the song at letter K so that we could read the book up to letter K.  We read each page, clapping the syllables for each word.  This really allowed the students to be involved with the story.  It also helped tremendously with the wiggles I talked about earlier.  Showing them the real fruits also piqued their interest.  This is such a great book for introducing new fruits and vegetables to your children.  The kids told me they didn't know what dates were, so it was sort of a mini-science lesson within the language lesson.  We also check any food allergies before we let the children eat anything.  So, when we got to letter K in the book, I showed them the kiwi and then we finished the rest of the Dr. Jean song.  After finishing the song, we went back to reading the book.  It went so much better than trying to read the whole book without any kind of movement in the middle.  I will always do it this way from now on!

Sample game boards for ABC BINGO

If you're interested, I have an ABC BINGO game (available on TPT) using very colorful pictures along with letters and words on the game boards and teacher cards.  I tried this out the same day as reading Eating The Alphabet, and my small group loved it.