Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (3)

We had a bunch of letters to cover this week in our preschool "Ramadan Club": س, ش, ص, ض, ط, ظ, ع and غ. We started with a review of the letters we covered in the first two weeks:

Letter Stepping-Stones:

• I got out our foam letters and pulled out letters ا through ز.
• I spread them out in a row, spaced jumping-distance apart.
• The kids lined up and took turns to jump down the row, saying the name of each letter before they landed. (In the end, everyone ended calling out the letters together, for each of the jumpers, which worked even better. More practice for everybody, and helpful for the kids who weren't so sure of all the letters.)
• Then we moved on to hopping down the row instead of jumping.

The kids were really enjoying it so we could definitely have kept on going with other kinds of jumps, but since it was only review, I wanted to move on to the new letters of the day. 

Build-A-Letter:

• For each kid, I made a set of letter parts like this (you can click to make it bigger, and then print it):

• Then I wrote one of our eight new letters on the board, repeated its name and asked the kids to build me one like it.

That's it. Simple, but the kids liked it, and it gave me lots of opportunities to repeat the name of the letter over and over again while the kids were focused on the corresponding letter-shapes. 

Dot-Jumping:

We seem to do a lot of jumping in these games, I know! 

• I wrote our eight new letters on the board, and had the kids crouch down on the floor like frogs.
• If I called out a letter that has a dot (or dots), the kids had to jump up in the air as high as they could. If I called out a letter with no dot, they had to stay still. 
• In the beginning, I helped out by pointing to the letter as I said it, and then moved on to saying the letter without giving them hints.
• They were really enjoying the jumping, so in the end we had them jump three times for three-dot letter, once for one-dot letters, and not at all for no-dot letters.

Al7amdulillah, the kids had fun, and ended up with at least a basic grasp of the new letters. Eight new letters for a bunch of four-and-five-year-olds in twenty minutes is really too much, no matter how much fun you make it, but we're trying to get through the whole alphabet during Ramadan insha'Allah.

For more in this series of posts, please see
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (1),
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (2) and
Preschool Arabic Alphabet Games (3).