Its been one year since I started the weekly letter crafting activity (we took many breaks in between though) with my two toddlers. In the beginning it was more of an hassle and since I was doing most of the work (cutting and arranging for my kids to glue the stuff together) I wondered if it is ever going to benefit us in anyway?Kept the kids involved

But my kids were interested in crafting so we pushed and kept moving forward.

By the end of the year we had this hefty messy notebook filled with letter crafts oozing out of it. Also, when my kids would sit down to read it all the way till end, I found myself constantly worrying of it being torn. Because it was paper. and we had put so much effort to gather it. (since I hope we can benefit from it in a long run too). I wanted something sturdier and found a binder in Pakistan. So i Just shifted all the crafts to that binder, its so much more safe and organize now. I love it and so does my kids.

Here is the New Binder

How Letter Crafting has helped us?

1. Kept them involved & Instilled Creativity Yes I had to do the major part of planning/designing/cutting but even if the kids have to arrange and glue a project they feel so much involved in it which means more motivation to learning.

2. Motivated them to learn Since it was something They made and it was ‘Theirs’ it got picked more rather than ANY OTHER store bought Abc book. Oftentimes my elder pretending to be a teacher read to her younger brother flipping through her book. I loved it.

3. Increased their VocabularyLike any picture book, crafting so many different objects/animals made us our vocabulary grew so much more.

4. Knowing a little more Sometimes while doing a craft kids would get so much into the subject that we would learn a lot more than planned. E.g. when we did B for Beaver we watched a documentary about Beavers and got to know so much more about their homes and lives and habitat. Similarly we learnt that both Koala & Kangroo live in Australia and then we learnt a little about Australia and its geography and locate it on the globe.

5. Eventually learning Phonics: When we started our phonics journey we would go through our letter craft book using the phonics like “Aaaa for ant and Baa for bear” etc and she picked up the letter sounds so fast.