L is for Lion, hear me roar!

As some of you may know my youngest son's name is very unique and very based upon a lion, so L happened to be one of my favorite Letters!  It also happens to be the only letter my 3 year old still has a hard time saying, so we love to practice it.  And we also have another girl blessed with an L name also, so she loved it. 

When I think of L I think of laughing and that is what I tried to keep my kiddos doing.  It was easy for the kids to get used to writing the Letter L and coming up with L words so we had fun.  We also made sure and worked on walking in a Line, trying to color inside the Lines, the difference between Large and Little and also how something can be Long.  Along with all that we managed to take our time learning the letter L and doing many fun activities including:

*We made Lion masks.  To achieve this you cut out the hole in the center of a paper plate, have strips of construction paper cute out in brown, yellow and orange, let the kiddos curl the paper using a pencil then glue the strips on.  You can also take this as a teaching moment with patterns and have them stick to a particular color pattern. As we worked on our Lion masks I told them some fun facts of Lions and how they are the King of the jungle.  As an added bonus since they had been so good I allowed them to watch LION KING!  Talk about a roaring good time :)

* We made hand print Lillies.  I took this from a pattern in a parents magazine, it was complicated but fun and the kids enjoyed seeing their hand print used to make something.  You cut out leaves from card stock that you will hole punch in the middle.  Then trace the kids right hand and cut it out.  Now curl them all with a pencil and attach to a green straw with tape.  And to top it all off you can cut a yellow pipe cleaner in half and stick it through the straw to stick up like the pollen.  These were pretty Lillies that they all took home to Mommy :)

* We made Love Ladybugs.  This was another fun template I borrowed from the web.  You cut out all the pieces for the kids before hand and let them count and glue them all together.  You need to cut out a Big Heart, a small heart ( in red), 2 small black hearts, 6 big legs that are L's, 2 small L legs and 2 antenna that are in the shapes of 6's.  This shows there are 6 legs to a ladybug.  I then drew on eyes and along the way we talked about how a lady bug grows and other interesting facts.  Like did you know that when they flap their wings they go at 84 times a second?!  And of course the hearts represent LOVE.  So there you have it, our Love Ladybug!