Letter Activities

When Jaden and Cody started their online school learning, I knew I would need something to keep Adley occupied. Thankfully, I had a whole collection of letter activities that my sister and I had assembled for our boys a few years ago. I was so excited that I could easily pull out these plans and have something productive for Adley to do each day. She LOVED this letter learning. In fact, when Jaden and Cody began their school work each morning, Adley would always drag out her little table, sit down, and ask, "What's MY activity, Mommy??" She is definitely a little sponge-- soaking up every detail. So fun! Here are some of our initial letter activities...

Letter T

I tried to focus on one letter per week with Adley. We'd usually start by creating a page for a tactile letter book. Adley would practice writing the letter to add to this page as well. We started with "T is for toothpicks."

Then, we did some transportation activities. When I put a number inside of this truck, Adley had to fill the truck with that number of Duplos. She loved dumping the blocks out at the end and piling them into her toy dump truck.

We also played a game of transportation memory with various vehicles on the cards. Jaden and Cody thought this looked like fun and joined in for a few rounds.

Another day, Adley made a traffic light by ripping and gluing paper scraps.

Adley also made a tree using triangles as leaves. She especially enjoyed using scissors to add fringe cuts to the leaves and drawing a few T's at the bottom of the page too.

Letter L

This week's tactile letter book page was "L is for leaves." Adley had fun collecting various leaves from our yard to complete this page.

I used a "L of all sizes" worksheet for her to practice writing L's. Adley loved this!

Adley particularly enjoys any activity involving scissors, so this lantern-making craft was a big hit!

Painting with Legos (duplos, actually, since they're easier to grab!) was a fun new idea too.

We also tied in some number-learning. Adley painted this ladybug that we could use for a counting game. I placed dots on one side of the ladybug for Adley to count. Then, she had to place the same number of dots on the opposite side of the ladybug. We played multiple rounds of this game all week long! She loved trying to match my number and even tried creating her own number patterns for me to copy.

When Adley finally tired of the game, we glued down the dots to complete her ladybug craft.

Since Adley LOVES stickers, she enjoyed this math game too. I told her which number to find on the leaf, and she would cover it with a dot sticker.

One of our last L activities was creating Lion and Lamb masks. 

Adley got such a kick out of making animal sounds while holding up these masks. Her favorite was making the wrong sound for each animal, saying "just teasing," and then giggling like crazy!

Letter F

We tried out a new way of writing letters this week-- tracing them in flour! Adley enjoyed learning F and then reviewing her T and L too.

She counted fish crackers into numbered bowls,

made a rainbow fish,

hopped like a frog to numbered lily pads,

traced and then decorated her feet outlines with various patterns,

and fingerpainted!

Adley's favorite activity of the week was watering sidewalk chalk flowers. I drew a bunch of flowers on the ground with letters inside each one. Then, I would tell her to water the L flowers or the F flowers as a letter review. She thought it was so fun to watch the letters disappear.

Letter E

When I taught Adley the letter E, we used a paint bag to practice forming the letter. Adley didn't spend long writing this way, as she truly does love her markers and paper. It was something different to try, at least! 

Her tactile letter book included a slew of googly eyes. I was quite impressed with Adley's written E that we attached to this page.

Since we were close to Easter when learning about the letter E, many of our activities included Easter eggs. One activity (which Adley wasn't too interested in) involved counting eggs and placing them in numbered nests.

The next egg-related activities involved paint, so Adley was fully on board with these! First, Adley used Easter egg halves dipped in paint to make a picture.

Then, she painted paper egg shapes using Q-tips.

My personal favorite is doing the marble print painting with shaving cream. The swirls always look so fun. Adley's eggs turned out looking amazing!

I combined all of the eggs Adley painted into a Easter banner for our fireplace mantel. Very festive. Adley was so proud.

We also did a few elephant-themed projects this week. I started by reading several Elmer the Elephant books to Adley. Then, she used construction paper squares (that she cut by herself using paper strips!) to create her own Elmer the Elephant.

We enjoyed Elmer so much that Adley also made Elmer stick puppets.

This elephant size sort took Adley no time at all!

It's hard for me to believe that Adley's already old enough to start these kinds of activities. It's sure fun to see how excited Adley gets when she can identify these letters in books and in the world around her. This girl will be reading before we know it! ;) 

More letter activities to be posted again soon...