Letter D is awesome — Dinosaurs, Dogs, Donuts, and Ducks! Check out my week-long plan for learning letter D.
Monday — D is for Dinosaur
- Writing Practice: write uppercase D. For this letter, we used a free printable worksheet from AtoZteacherstuff.com
- Book: Crunch the Shy Dinosaur by Cirocco Dunlap. This is a fun, interactive book that really engages with the reader. Young children will have a blast getting to know Crunch by saying hello, singing Happy Birthday, and introducing themselves. It also encourages the reader to take into consideration that other people (and dinosaurs) might be shy when you first meet them and to let them have some quiet space to adjust to new people.
Check your library for Crunch, the Shy Dinosaur, or buy it on Amazon.
- Craft / Activity: Dinosaur Coloring Page — use your creativity and color an awesome dino picture! Then, Find 5 Differences between these 2 dinosaur scenes.
- Song: This was great excuse to sing along to our of my favorite preschool songs, We Are the Dinosaurs by the Laurie Berkner Band. Watch the music video on YouTube and march along!
Tuesday —
- STEM: Build a Froot Loops Tower. This project is great for working on fine-motor skills!
Supplies needed are Play-Doh, a dry spaghetti noodle, and Froot Loops cereal.
First, make a mound out of Play-Doh to use as your tower’s base.
Second, stick a spaghetti noodle into the center of the base and make sure to really smush the Play-Doh around the bottom of the noodle so that it stands up.
Now it is time to make the tower and work on fine motor skills! Take your Froot Loops and carefully drop each down the noodle, making a tower as they stack. Have fun making color patterns. Bonus, you get to eat the cereal after your are done making towers 😉
- Air Writing: Ask your child to hold up a hand and trace letter shapes with their finger in the air. I was skeptical of this at first, but my son really got into it and I found him air writing his letters all on his own.
- “Dog I Spy” Worksheet: practice counting with this cute dog-themed I Spy picture.
Wednesday — D is for Dog and Donut
- Writing practice: write lowercase letter d. I found this worksheet online from PreschoolMom.com: https://preschoolmom.com/wp-content/uploads/PMom/AlphabeWorksheets/D2.pdf
- Books — We read dog stories! My son loves Karma Wilson’s book, A Dog Named Doug. Doug the dog is a digging machine. He digs a holes to everywhere and gets into a bit of trouble along the way. The book ends happily with Doug digging a hole into his family’s bedroom for a bedtime cuddle. My son loves this book and he laughs every single time we read it. We have checked this out from our library numerous times, and we hope you will check it from yours too! It is also available on Amazon if you want to buy it.
We also read Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Dog a Donut. Turns out if you give a dog a donut, a great story ensues! This cute story is a fun read-aloud and good introduction to sequencing. Find a copy at your library, or buy on Amazon.
- Craft — Paper Plate Donut. Supplies needed are paper plate, light brown watercolor paint and paintbrush, construction paper (we used pink), scissors, white glue, and sprinkles.
1. First my son painted the entire plate light brown.
2. While it was drying, we picked our construction paper for the donut icing. We went with the classic pink for our donut, but also strongly considered brown for a chocolate icing. I cut out a wavy shape in the pink paper.
3. After the donut plate was dry, I cut out the center to give it the donut shape.
4. My son used white, school glue to attach the icing to the plate.
5. Last, he glued on sprinkles to complete his paper plate donut 🙂
- Songs — For letter D, we sang the “Donut Song.” If you don’t know this song, you can check it out on YouTube. My son loves this song and he sings it all of the time!
Thursday —
- Salt Tray Writing: cover the bottom of a shallow tray or pie tin with a layer of table salt. Your child can take one finger to trace letter shapes in the salt. Make both uppercase D and lowercase d.
- Worksheet: Draw a line from the lowercase d to all of the uppercase D letters. Free Letter D recognition worksheet.
Friday — D is for Duck
- Writing Practice: write uppercase D and lowercase d. We used this worksheet from K5 Learning: https://www.k5learning.com/worksheets/kindergarten/tracing-letters-d.pdf
- Book: Little Quack’s New Friend by Lauren Thompson. The whole Little Quack series is adorable, but I am partial to this one because I love the new froggy friend. This Little Quack story embodies preschooler’s shyness about meeting new people, but children’s innate playfulness and curiosity wins over and everyone has fun playing together. Plus, this story is full of fun sound words to say!
- Craft: Color and Feather Duck Craft — supplies needed are duck coloring sheet, crayons, white school glue, and feathers.
Here’s the coloring page we used. I found it on getcoloringpages.com. Feel free to draw your own duck or cut out a duck shape from construction paper if you don’t like this one.
We used crayons to color our duck. My son worked hard to color within the lines! Then we picked out feathers for our duck and attached them with white, school glue.
- Song: Raffi’s Five Little Ducks. I really enjoy doing hand movements to this song. We hold up fingers on one hand for the five little ducks, folding down fingers as the ducks go over the hill. The other is our mama duck and we keep our fingers together and move them up and down to touch the thumb to make a mouth movement for the quacking parts. If you don’t know this song, it’s available on YouTube.
Thanks for learning letter D with us! I hope you enjoyed the stories and activities as much as we did. Please check your local library for the books I suggested. I also included links to purchase them on Amazon.com. I’ve joined Amazon Affiliate’s program, so if you purchase a book through one of my links, then I get a small percentage of the sale (at no additional cost to you!). I appreciate your support! Happy learning 🙂