I had about 10 minutes to try and come up with an activity I wanted to do with my little boys group today... and it needed to be something active, so this was the silly activity I came up with. There are two versions, one that just involves throwing and target practice, and another that involves some letter recognition.
Materials Needed: very soft balls or bean bags, tape, several printouts of turkey coloring pages (we used 6 to spell "turkey"), markers, and foam turkey stickers.
Easy Version
Tape the turkey pictures onto a wall and have the kids try and hit them with the soft balls. When they hit a turkey they need to say "Gobble, Gobble" and run around flapping their arms like a turkey... and then they can start again!
Harder Version
- Write a letter on each turkey coloring page to spell "turkey."
- Stick them up on a wall with tape
- Tell your child which letter you want them to try and hit with the ball. If your child knows his/her letters already, you could say, "hit the turkey that makes the /t/ sound" or "hit the turkey whose letter is at the beginning of the word umbrella"... or whatever you want to do.
- Get out any foam stickers you have (we used turkey ones) and tell your child the letter that you want them to cover with the stickers. My little guy loved using these stickers and saying "gobble, gobble."
There are tons of different things you could do with this simple activity.
My goals were to work on...
- hand/eye coordination (throwing the ball at a target)
- letter recognition (throwing ball at a specific letter that I told him to hit and sticking a sticker on a specific letter that I told him to find)
- letter sounds (we practiced the letter sounds after he stuck stickers on the different letters)
- expose him to the letters that were in the word "turkey"
Older kids could work on learning to spell and read the word turkey.
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