Bath Letters

Dear Em,
For your very first Christmas, I picked out a tube of foam letters & numbers for the bath to put in your stocking. I had no idea how much we would come to love & use these letters. At first, you were only one. You just liked that there were new toys in the bath & they were colorful. The game we mostly played with them was me trying to distract you from putting them in your mouth.

As you've grown, we started to use them in other ways. When you were learning to count, we would line the numbers up on the bathtub wall. As you learned to recognize letters, I would encourage you to hunt for each letter. "Where's the A," I would ask. I will always remember the proud smile on your face once you found it among the lake of letters & held it in the air for me to see. As you learned to associate sounds with letters, I would pick up a letter & ask you what sound it made.

Now that you know what the letters look like & what sounds they make, we're starting to work on making words. The another night we made "AT" words. First you found the "A" & the "T" & put them up on the wall. Then I would call out an "AT" word, for instance BAT. You searched through the tub of letters until you found the "B" & triumphantly placed it up on the wall next to "AT." Then we sounded out each of the letters on the wall before pronouncing it was a word: BAT.

Then I would call out a new word & you would do it all over again. You made PAT, RAT, CAT, SAT, BAT, FAT, HAT, MAT, & NAT. Its a game you adore, your face is so proud as you create each new word. You always pout when it's time to get out of the bath because it means the game is done.

I'm enjoying this stage where learning is fun & you're such a little sponge soaking it all up. Even the bathtub is your classroom.

I love you so,
Mommy