Personal Flannel Boards

Lately on many blogs I have noticed there have been a lot of posts about flannel / felt boards usage in preschool classrooms.  I love using them in my preschool classroom and wanted to share something I made for the kiddos.  I made personal sized flannel boards so that I can have a center set up with that more then one child can use at a time. Here is how I made them:

*Materials Needed*
8.5 x 11 sized pieces of felt (these can be purchased at Michaels or AC Moore)
cheap 8 x 10 sized frames (I got mine at the dollar store)
hot glue gun / glue
scissors

*Step 1*

Remove the backing from the frame and put the glass aside.

*Step 2*
Using the hot glue, make a thin line of glue on the outside edges; do ONE edge at a time.


*Step 3*
Adhere the felt to the lines of glue; when you start adhering the felt, start by lining up the corners of the frame back and the felt.

*Step 4*
Once you have the felt adhered to the frame backing cut off the excess felt using your scissors.

*Step 5* 

Once the felt is adhere and the excess has been cut off, you should have a felt board!  

But wait, there's MORE!

*Step 6*
Using your glue gun, create a thin line of glue on the backside of the frame on the lip.
Do all four edges at once.

*Step 7*

Take the back of the frame with the felt and press it into the front of the frame to glue the two pieces together.    Use the tabs on the back of the frame to help keep the frame together.  

TA-DA! Here are the completed flannel boards!! Enjoy! I can't wait to use these with my students this week!

Letter Sounds

Today Sunshine and I worked on letter identification and sounds.  We first put together this Melissa and Doug alphabet puzzle: 

As we put the pieces back in we talked about the name of each letter, the picture underneath, and the sound the letter makes.  After we completed the puzzle, we sang the song from the Leap Frog Letter Factory DVD. (Here is a clip from that video if you are not familiar with it; the letter song is sung towards the end of the clip! We LOVE this video!!!)

Sunshine can identify W, K, B, O consistently, and a few others not all the time. We will get there, slowly but surely.