Alphabet Glue: Volume Eight

There are a lot of kids magazine out there, most of them filled with bright colors, flashy anthropomorphic characters and bad story lines, but Alphabet Glue is NOT one of those. Created by Annie of Bird and Little Bird (see my interview with her here), Alphabet Glue is a great online magazine that inspires children to connect their reading, writing, crafting and imagination skills. Each issue is based around a theme, for example, seasons or nature.  It is full of craft projects that require children to connect their reading and writing skills as well as book making with children feature every month.

One of the most brilliant parts of the magazine is the book lists. Every month Annie brings together an amazing list of books for children from as young as 2 to as old as 10. She has a great system of telling which books are good for what age group and reading level. We often bring the young reader list to the library and check out books based on her recommendations.

So when Annie asked me to do a feature on Volume Eight I couldn't resist! You might ask me if the magazine is for kids who read and write how can a three year old enjoy it? Well I'm here to tell you they most definitely can. There are also ways projects that can be done by or altered to fit their abilities. In this issue the projects that worked well for S (who will be three in October) were the pinwheel story starters and rain making experiment.

We started our day with the pinwheels. I printed and cut out the papers on card-stock the night before. Then in the morning I had S chose two old colored pencils to use for the sticks.

Then I folded over the points of the paper and allowed S to smooth them out.

Since we have been practicing our cutting skills, I allowed her to use her safe scissors to cut the lines of pinwheels. I then did the pinning of the paper to the pencil as that takes more small motor skills then she has mastered yet.

Of course she can't read yet, but I can, so I asked her to blow on the pin wheel and I read whatever character or story plot it landed on and that's where we started our "Lupine Story" (she's our special made-up character, that we tell stories about all the time. I'll tell you all about her soon).

The rain making experiment was easy enough to do with a three year old as well. I filled the jar with hot water, S put in the food coloring (she wanted pink), she put the ice and water in the pie pan and I placed it on the jar. Done.

It really did work but we didn't wait around for it. We went out to the sand box and when we can back there were droplets on the underside of the pie pan. We talked a little about evaporation and the water cycle. What a day full of learning we had thanks to just two activities from this magazine!

Please check out Alphabet Glue; you'll love it like we do, I know it! It's made by Annie with lots of love and it only costs $4 per issue so totally affordable. It's available as PDF and on iPad. You can check out it by clicking here or on the button on my sidebar. And if you buy Volume 8, Annie is giving away a free copy of the Summer Science Special.

**If you do buy it and try out the activities, please come back and let me know how it went for you.