Pretzel ABCs

My almost 4 year old usually gets ignored during school time as I focus on getting the bigger kids through their lessons, but it's one of my new year's goals to get him more involved.

When I was a teacher in training, my teachers often talked about trying to incorporate lots of different materials to help teach the alphabet and make it more tactile, like drawing letters with fingers in shaving cream or sand, or forming letters out of wiki sticks (the wax covered yarn) and tracing them with fingers. Christopher is working on his alphabet, and doesn't quite have the fine motor skills to use a pencil easily, so today we formed letters with pretzels.

I bought a bag of thin sticks, large curved ones, and a bag of generic chex mix that used some circle pretzels. I used a serrated knife to cut through some of them to make the half circles I needed for some of the letters. With Christopher, I would make a letter, he'd tell me what letter it was and what sound it made, and then he would try to make it himself. At the end, we made his name and some simple words. Joshua and Maren wanted to play along also. Then we all had pretzels and chex mix for snack time.