Letter Y, oh why?

 I've been pretty enthusiastic about most of our letters, finding a lot of different learning activities to engage the children for each one.  Letter Y is stumping me.  Perhaps it's because there's not a whole lot of things that start with Y, or maybe it's because we studied Y the same week that I took 3 separate groups to the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens to see the Butterflies in the Garden exhibit.  Maybe we were all just a little worn out, as it was also the week before Spring Break.  No matter what, Y got the short end of the stick.  Literally.

 

We searched the back yard for sticks shaped like the letter y,  and the pictures we took with our sticks will go into our abc photo albums.

I've mentioned our abc photo albums many times, but I don't think I've taken pictures of them to share before.  Each week, one of our activities is making one of these pages.  I have 2 different versions - the stamps, stickers and pictures version, for most of the children, and a word writing page for the kindergarteners who are able to sound out whole words.  Each child has their own album of these pages.  On the facing pages in our books, I mount a picture of the child/author, doing one of our letter of the week activities.  The children love to look at pictures of themselves, so they often sit and go through their books, reviewing letters and sounds as they do. 

Last year I only had a yak for our letter y hand print, but Ms. Julie came up with a terrific idea to make yachts!  I know my kiddos don't have experience with yaks or yachts, and I want what we do here to be meaningful, so we looked up photos of yachts, and a short video of yaks.  We decided that yaks are basically hairy cows!

 So what other y words can the kids relate to?  Yellow of course, and also yukky and yarn (I'm an avid crocheter).  We made a concoction of half glue and half water, and had the children drench short pieces of yarn in the yukky stuff, then glue it to their lower case y craft.  It was yukky alright!  It's kind of funny that so many of the children didn't want to get their fingers in the glue mixture, but that when we go outside they dig around for pillbugs and peach seeds - and I have to keep them out of the compost when they're doing it!

 Finally, here are examples of our letter Y crafts.

Do you think by next year we'll find more Y activities?  Oh, yes!