I accidentally discovered another fun way to teach the Eskimo his letters today. We have this hand powered egg beater that my grandma bought me a few years ago. Frankly, she was shocked to discover on her last visit that I didn't own one and insisted we go out and find one immediately. After much searching, we found ours at William's Sonoma and if I recall, it cost about $20. She was right, I use it all the time when cooking, but I discovered a new use for it today: learning! The egg beater is one of the Eskimo's favorite kitchen utensils to play with. I gave it to him this morning while I was trying to clean up the kitchen, and looked over to see him sitting on his foam alphabet mat, mixing away. I stopped what I was doing and started asking him to mix certain letters: Can you mix the D? Which letter are you mixing now? Look, you're mixing the P!
We went through about half the alphabet this way before he got bored and wandered off to play with something else. This reinforced the letters with which he is already familiar and gave him a chance to mix up some unfamiliar letters as well.
If you don't own one of these foam alphabet mats, you could always write the letters out on pieces of paper and tape them to the floor, but I highly recommend purchasing the foam letters. We use them every single day, whether he's using the mat as a runway to jump into my arms (my favorite way to wear him out before bed!), or he's stomping on letters as we call them out. These were given to us as a gift, but I think they are fairly cheap and they are definitely worth it.
