Ll Looks Like a Lovely Letter

Here we are in late fall, looking at letter Ll - it's time for a leaf pile!  Playing in leaves has kept my kiddos busy for months every year, and it never seems to get old to them - or to me! 

Leafy learning certainly starts outside - watching the changing of the seasons, seeing leaves change color and beginning to fall, playing in leaf piles - but it doesn't have to stay outside!  It's fun to take leaves into the classroom and to sort them by shape, size or color, to make leaf rubbings, to graph the colors of the leaves we've collected, and more.  (I created printables for these activities, which are available in my TeachersPayTeachers store.)

I like to start our letter explorations with lots of items that start with our focus letter, so for Ll I collected ladybugs, lizards, lobsters, lunch lady, lightening, lions, lemons and more in a Lion King gift bag, and had the children take turns to pull them out and name each item. 

We lay on the floor and measured ourselves with lovely long lines of lace - to see whether we were longer or the lace was longer.

For some hand print fun, we made lions or ladybugs - we think they're lovely!

Another fun L word is lamb - so we replaced Mary with our own names and sang Mary Had a Little Lamb as we snuggled a stuffed animal lamb (or a leopard, because that's fun too)!  I typed out the words for each child's version of the song, and they highlighted all the Ll letters they could find, then made it into a class book so we could read it over and again. These pages are included in my Class Books Bundle.

Do you know the song Lavender's Blue?  This is a perfect week to learn it if you don't already know it!

By now you probably know I like to do a letter craft with the children too, and of course we made both upper and lower case letter Ll.  We put ladybugs and leaves on logs for the upper case letter, and glued on lace for the lowercase letter.

You could also do a directed drawing of a lion.  It's amazing what little children can manage when you break something down into tiny steps for them!  We made our drawings in pencil, then went over the lines with black or dark brown crayon, then finally painted with shades of orange and brown.

I hope you have fun learning with the letter L this week!  Which activity does your child like the most?  I'd love to hear from you!