Letter of the Week for U



Letter U can sometimes be a challenge.   ESPECIALLY, when you are trying desperately to stick with the short u sound only.  So, that means just using words that begin with the "uh" sound.

Still, we came up with a quite a few utterly amazing things to share with U (I mean, you!) from our letter of the week packet for U.


Our "Story" for the letter U is that Glimmercat begins to get rained on and is trying to open up her Umbrella.  She is pushing on the opener and makes a little grunt as she tries to open it and the grunt sounds like:  "Uh!  Uh!"

So, we open with a fun image and mnemonic for connecting U with the short u sound.

We appropriate the word "Under" as a prefix for several of our activities, and you should know we don't shy away from "Underwear", as seen here with a Bear in Underwear.  In fact, we even utilize this idea for one of our crafts.


I'm sorry, you just hafta do underwear with young children.  They have a blast with potty humor and pretty soon, you will be giggling too.  Is it funny?  Not really.  But the giggling kiddos make it so.

Our underwear craft is pretty basic.  It's just a diaper shape on paper.    But what makes it useful is that it is a pretty good size for using on stuffed animals.  You have to have a stuffed animal.  I know, we call it optional on the Craft sheet, but it makes the underwear so much more fun.


I mean, look at that grin.  You see what I mean?  You really need a stuffed animal.

Another day in our Letter of the Week packet, we use "Under", as in Underground.  We begin with a dot to dot page that shows an underground insect world....


 And the craft we have for this day was just so much fun:


This is our Underground craft.  Here, you can see my son cutting out his underground square all by himself.   Now as you know, if you follow this blog at all, I love to use snacks in our crafts when possible.  This craft calls for raisins.  The ants are made out of raisins.


How much fun is it to munch and craft at the same time?  We also lined the surface of the dirt with a mixture of flour and coffee grounds.  I would have just used coffee grounds, but mine were still wet from that morning's coffee and I was not far-sighted enough to save the previous day's grounds and dry them all up.


Our raisins almost dwarfed the little ant legs that are drawn onto this sheet.  We used big raisins.  But you still get the idea.  And the "soil" is fun (and messy!).

Getting back to Umbrellas, let's chat about this Umbrella craft.


I wanted something special for the Umbrella Craft in our Letter of the Week packet, so I created a melted crayon craft to simulate the look of rain.  And I love how this turned out, even though our printer was just running out of green and blue which is why we got that faded orange background.  It's still so COOL!!



So, kids can choose a boy or girl image.  We also have it in black and white so that they can color the child they choose however they please.


Here's my son's print out.  We attached the umbrella...



And then dug out some broken crayons.  We chose crayons in various shades of blue, but you could use all the colors if you wanted.  It will still look fun!


Here is my boy, taping on his crayons.  He chose a pattern for them because he loves patterns.


And then I manipulated the blow dryer.  It didn't take long to get these crayons to melt!  We saw the crayons begin to look wet and melty rather quickly.  And then I tried to steer the paper a bit.  This was SUCH a fun craft!



For a lot more U activities, both printables, reading literacy activities, flash cards and a Letter U Matching Game, head over to our teacher store here



For the other alphabet letter of the week packets, we offer the following blog links with crafts included:

Letter of the Week for A

Letter of the Week for B

Letter of the Week for C

Letter of the Week for D

Letter of the Week for E  

Letter of the Week for F

Letter of the Week for G

Letter of the Week for H

Letter of the Week for I

Letter of the Week for J

Letter of the Week for K

Letter of the Week for L

Letter of the Week for M

Letter of the Week for N

Letter of the Week for O

Letter of the Week for P

Letter of the Week for Q

Letter of the Week for R

Letter of the Week for S


Letter of the Week for T

Letter of the Week for U

Letter of the Week for V

Letter of the Week for W

Letter of the Week for X


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