Floor is Lava (Alphabet): A Fun Way to Learn Sounds
For the first semester of Kindergarten we have been working on recognizing the alphabet. So far we have been using All About Reading curriculum to do this along with random review days. Language Arts has been my son’s least favorite subject to do each day. I don’t really blame the curriculum as I feel there isn’t much you can do with language arts until you know the alphabet. As it is a struggle to get him motivated to want to learn the alphabet I realized we needed to make it a little more fun. When I tell you this game was a hit, that is an understatement. He was ASKING if we could play it more. It was so simple to set up and there are various ways you could use it! Number recognition, sounds, adding, subtracting, or animal sounds could all be used for this!
To set up, we used our nugget couch. If you don’t have a nugget, all you are really trying to do is create little “islands” where they are safe from the lava and it is clear as to which island they are on. You could lay out blankets, pillows, stepping stones, nugget couches, couch cushion, or even just pieces of paper. On each “island” you would place a paper with a letter on it. I taped mine down so they didn’t fly across the room when my kids were jumping from couch to couch. I think it was smart to only put out 5 or 6 letters at a time. You could always add more if you have space, or just change out which letters are on the islands.
The rules were simple: I started out by singing the Leapfrog Letter Factory song for each letter. If you don’t know that movie, watch it here! It will help! I would sing “The B says buh, the B says buh, every letter makes a sound, the B says buh.” They would need to jump to the letter B before the end of my song. If you don’t feel like singing, you could just say the letter or the sound and set a short timer for them to get there before the timer goes off. After we had done one round of all of the letters on each island, I switched to only saying the sound. So my song was more like “buh buh buh buh, buh buh buh buh, buh buh….” You get the picture. They still had to get there before my song ended.
School is a lot more fun when you can turn it into a game. My son has really been struggling with learning his sounds, but by making it into a game, he was able to remember so many more sounds. I even heard him playing it with his sister later and getting many of the sounds we had practiced right.
