Preschool at Home: Learning Letters

by Liesl - Homeschool Den

I thought it might be useful to pull a lot of our letter-activities together into one post, although we didn’t ever focus exclusively on letters. We generally had a theme or unit (astronomy, birds, volcanoes, bears, pirates, princesses and whatever else the kids were interested in at the time…) and we added in these types of activities to supplement whatever else was going on. So, just keep in mind that I pulled these activities out of context.

When my kids were little, we added in a lot of games to learn to recognize the letters, learn the letter sounds and learn the shapes and how to form the various letters. Here’s a glimpse at the kinds of activities we did to keep it fresh and fun!

File Folder Games:

We played lots of matching file folder games. The spider web matching came from a paid website I belonged to called Kidssoup, but the hearts capital-lower case matching came from File Folder Fun. Child Care Land also has lots of free file folder games and other early learning activities.

Sandpaper Letters:

I purchased a set of sandpaper letters and the kids used them a lot when they were 2-3 years old. It’s a Montessori activity that we did regularly. We got ours from didax.com or you can get them from Montessori stores such as Kidadvance:

Here ED then matched some foam letter stickers to an index card. We usually only focused on a few letters at at time:

Cereal Box Matching:

ED had to put letters in the correct slot in the cereal box. You can find the alphabet printed out in various themes and I used to do this a lot using websites such as Communication 4 All (look in the literacy area)

Scavenger Hunts:

I always tried to make learning fun and interactive. Here the girls went on a scavenger hunt to find their letters and then they had to mail them as they told me what letter/letter sound they made:

You can download these “letters” we “mailed here (free): Mailing Letters Cards–I made these letters Aa Bb Cc Ee Ll Mm Nn Oo Rr and Ss

Drawing Letters in Sand:

For those of you who don’t know much about the Montessori method, I actually sat down with ED and “presented” the activity below to her. I show her each and every step…

take out the blanket and spread it on the ground
take the tray with two hands and lift it down and place it on the blanket
lift up the lid
sketch the letter in the sand
mail the letter
take the sand tray with two hands and shake it back and forth
repeat until done
put the tray away
fold up the blanket
put the blanket away

I think arming ED with EACH step has really made a big difference to how successful she is at doing the various activities and then repeating them on her own.

Hands on Activities:

We often fit the letter activities into whatever unit/holiday we were working on/celebrating such as the bird unit or the Shamrock fishing activities below:

An activity after reading Green Eggs and Ham!

Using foam letters and contact paper to create a matching game:

Clothes Pin Matching:

Using Clothes Pins to match the letters. These letter matching cards are from Honey at Sunflower Schoolhouse (the link I had doesn’t seem to be working anymore), though it would be easy enough to make with a marker and an index card.

This is something similar from Making Learning Fun — Upper – Lower Case Letter Matching

Here is another cute letter matching activity from Making Learning Fun:

Do-a-Dots:

My kids loved doing the do-a-dot activities (with bingo markers). The ones pictured below are by Erica at Confessions of a Homeschooler. Erica developed an entire curriculum around the letters of the alphabet. Here’s an example of her Letter A activities or Letter F Activities. Awesome, right?! We just used a few of these activities and fit them into our units (More about that in another post!!). You can also find do-a-dot letters at Making Learning Fun.

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