 So this is a lesson for three and four year olds about identifying the difference between a word and a letter. So my lesson today is with my big hungry bear and I just made this bear out of a cardboard box and I have a little mouth that can open and shut and I have some fish that are drawn on some paper. So on these fish are either words or letters and I tell my students, my big hungry bear is very hungry and he only wants to eat words. Now we've already talked about how letters are all alone and words have many letter friends. So the big hungry bear wants to eat as many letters as he can. So that means he needs a word. So I'll ask my students, can you come and find the big hungry bear a word to eat? So they'll walk up to where I'm sitting and they will look at my choices and hopefully they can find a word. If not, that's okay and maybe you could start by pointing at one and explaining that look, there's many letters on this one and then they'll pick him up and they'll slide him into the bear mouth and then what's so fun about this is you can go um, num, num and they think it's so funny because that bear is eating their word and then I'll have another student come and this is also fun because when they pick up this word they're interacting with it. They're looking at it, they're seeing, maybe they already know that that's an E. So that can be exciting too. Let them tell you that. It's okay to talk about what they see. So they're going to come and they're going to grab a word, they're going to put him in his mouth and again I'm going to say um, num, num. Oh, thank you. So when all my words are eaten what's going to be left over is just the letters and so we'll be able to see oh, these fish got away because the bear only wanted our words. So again this is my way of explaining again the difference between a letter and a word for three and four year olds. So in my lesson I used a box that I made into a bear but you can use whatever materials you have on hand. You could draw on an envelope and feed the letters to your frog or you could even use a puppet and feed your puppet the letters or the words.