“Do I have to go to daycare mommy?” my eldest (almost 5 years old) asks us regularly. “It’s so boring! All I do is play, play, play and play.”
And then she rolls with her eyes and acts dramatically.
I usually ask her what she would like to do in stead of playing, and then she says: “Learn the alphabet and do mathematics.”
Aha, right. Numbers are not my forte, but letters I can roll with.
So I decided to make a Dutch alphabet for her. Not a Danish one (despite the extra three letters, which I still find very lovely and exotic), but just something Dutch, because everything else is Danish here.
I had gotten the prettiest block calendar as a birthday present last year, but I had already stopped tearing the pages off on January 4th (sorry, gift giver!).
However, since the pictures were so nice, I had not thrown it away, thinking I could use it for something at some point.
And that was now!
I found 26 beautiful illustrations, cut them out (after using a pre-cut square to make them all equal in size) and glued them to two sheets of paper. I had a little trouble finding images for Q and X, but I managed to find something acceptable (quiz and x-mas – even though the last one is not really a word. But better that than xenophobe or xylophone which had no corresponding pictures in the calendar anyways).
I drew green lines around all the illustrations, trying to ‘ground’ them, if that makes sense. And I wrote the words underneath them with red marker, on orders of my daughter (everything has to be red).
I am so pleased with the results. Of course it looks home made. You could ‘dial that down’ by printing the letters of the alphabet or by using a ruler for the lines, but I didn’t opt for that, since I wanted it to be unpolished.
I found a loose style complementing the nature of the illustrations, but also -more importantly- the nature of my kid.
Have you made any alphabets for your kids? I would love to see them. Have a nice day!
