The Sound ‘P’

For the sound ‘P’ our activities included:

• Making Pancakes:

We mostly cheat and use pancake mix but I feel better about this by using a whole wheat mix and by adding flax. With this batch of pancakes, we also added chopped apples, from a friend’s garden.

Daisy loves helping by measuring, cracking eggs and mixing. I let her drop the pancake batter onto the pan this time. She was nervous around the hot pan and we ended up with some funny shaped pancakes but she was very proud.

• Making and Eating ‘P’ foods

We made pizza from pita and added our own toppings; pasta sauce, tuna, peppers, zucchini and cheese. This a favourite weekend activity in our house but we did it on ‘P’ day for lunch. Rose loves her pizza and peas.

• Papaya Still Life

While I am a big fan of crafts, I love art for art’s sake. I found a papaya at the grocery store last week and decided that my kids should love papaya as much as I do. It doesn’t always work like that but I can try!  We talked about the colour, texture and smell and Daisy drew and coloured.

Her first image was done while the papaya was still whole. She hypothesized about what would be inside and guessed the flesh would be white and the seeds black.

Her second image is drawn looking at the cut papaya. One of our go-to alphabet books is A is for Ampe:

and P is for Paw Paw (aka Papaya) in this book. I ate papaya most days when I lived in both Rwanda and Togo and love it with lime juice over it. Rose loved the taste but Daisy was a little disturbed by the seeds and didn’t want to try it. Next time hopefully she will love it!

• ‘P’ Yoga Postures

Peacock (imagine the tail feathers I told her; we are working on sitting tall with a sting pulling us up, like a puppet)

Plank

Pretzel (spinal twist; inhaling and letting the head lead the twist, holding for 8 and slowly releasing)

• Making words with ‘P’ in them. 

I use a phonics handbook to list the words on our blackboard in the kitchen and Daisy makes the words either on the fridge independently or with us. Here she is working with her Papa using magnetic uppercase letters.

• Singing about the sound ‘P’
• Making ‘P’ paper bag puppets.

Boma and Daisy worked to make princess puppets and enjoyed playing with the puppet theatre and her other puppets.

• Looking at various representations of ‘P’ on Pinterest
• Reading about ‘P’ 
• Quick ‘P’ find Pug (the real one wouldn’t stay still), pan, puzzle, pen, pencil, pig, pear, pom-pom and ponytail.

• Pom-pom activity

This idea was taken from another blog; Engaging Toddler Activities and I thought Rose would love it.

I used an old container and cut slices with scissors. She loved pushing the pom poms though and wondering where they went. This kept her amused for 20 minutes! She even came back to it later in the day.