We take a walk around our little neighborhood daily, sometimes twice daily. We often walk to the park or over to the busy construction sight to check out the happenings there. Sometimes we just walk to walk. We aimlessly meander around the loop and talk about what we see. Our neighborhood is very little boxes-esque so there’s not a ton of variation when we set off on these walks. We generally see the same things; ants, dogs, trees, grass, airplanes. Sometimes there’s a bird thrown into the mix and occasionally we will see a car driving on the rode. These aimless walks are nice. They present me with such a wonderful time for discussion with the children. We talk about everything. Lately our topic of conversation has been hyper-focused, in a way only a three-year-old can, on letters. We talk about the letters in our names, the letters in our friends names, the letters on the signs, the letters on our clothes, letters everywhere! Last week I decided to really help this idea of letters-all-over-in-our-world by giving these kiddos a concrete way to represent just how many letters we see when we are out and about.
Each child had a small notebook with a pen to start with. They were each assigned the beginning letter in their name to find. Once they found their letter they would make a tally in their notebook and move on to find another one of their beginning letters. These guys were soooo excited! They were jumping up and down to see the letter “E” on garbage cans, squealing with delight to find a “B” on a license plate! Their excitement is wonderful and I love watching those little hands work to make the tally marks!
Our Dandelion Wishes 