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My three year old daughter loves books and she loves the idea of letters. She is full force in the why stage and often asks what things start with what letter. If she ever sees anything with the letter her name starts with, she says that it starts with her. While I don’t want to push reading on her too early, I do want to take advantage of her letter curiosity. So, we started a fun alphabet craft to let her group athings that start with the same letter together.
We did a few different groups of things on our letters, but there are so many more possibilities. We will probably do this again with other things in a few months. I do want to stress that we did this purely for fun and not as a way to try to force a skill she is too young to master on her. Read about other fun ways to help foster pre-reading skills in young children.
How to Make a Simple Letter Alphabet Craft
Prep:
Before you can glue, tape, and stick things to letters you kind of need letters. I typed out big bubble letters and printed them out. Here are my letters if you want to get crafting even quicker. Then, I hung all the letters up on the art clothesline I made for my daughter.
Adding to the Letters:
Next, my daughter colored, glued, taped, and stuck different objects on the letter that they started with. We did different categories of things each day. We ended up doing 5 different types of things, but there are so many others you can do.
Colors
The first thing we did was grab a box of markers and color each letter that those colors started with. For the letters that had multiple colors, my daughter got all the colors at once and she colored with all of them. We stuck with just the basic colors.
Example: P is for purple and pink
Animal Stickers
Next, I found a bunch of animal stickers we had on hand. I let her choose one and then we went through and found all the animals starting with that letter. This saved me from standing up to get other letters approximately a million times. We had way too many stickers, and my daughter got bored about 20 letters in. If we did this again, I would use less stickers.
Example: D is for dolphin, deer, and duck
Number Dots
Then, we did numbers. At three years old, my daughter doesn’t know how to write numbers. So, thinking that I was super clever, I had her put sticker dots as the numbers 1-10 on each one. For letters that had multiple numbers starting with it, we used different colors for each number. My daughter loved the dots the most, but nobody (including her) understood what they meant.
Example: T is for two, three, and ten
Snacks
Snacks was another “great” idea that I ended up regretting. I took one of a bunch of snacks and gave them to my daughter to glue on. The grease from a few of them spread on the paper which I thought was gross. But worse than that, my one year old son now can see all of his favorite snacks hanging on the wall in front of him while he eats his meals. Of course he points and shrieks at them hoping to get them instead of his actual food.
Example: C is for chip, Chex, Cheerio, and Cheez-It
Printed Pictures
Lastly, we did one printed picture for each letter. With the previous four categories, we had something on most of the letters. But, we needed something to cover the last few. My daughter loves her Laurie Berkner Tonie which has an alphabet song on it. I looked up the lyrics to it and found each of the items on Clip Safari. If you want to use the same pictures, here they are. Then, my daughter glued and taped these pictures onto each letter to fill them up. And yes we listened to that song on repeat for the majority of the time we did this part.
Example: Z is for zipper
Other Ideas
- Items from nature
- Pictures of family members
- Pictures of clothing items
- Craft items
- Pictures of favorite book or show characters
- Traced letters
Outcome of A to Z Alphabet Craft:
26 letters is a lot. My daughter went through waves of love and boredom with this craft. I do want to do it again with different things, but I think I will do all smaller categories to keep her interest. She is very proud of her craft and likes telling people (even strangers) about it, so I know it was a success. It is hung up in front of our dinner table, so even though I have said it is done, we will keep it up to talk about it for a while. What types of things did you use for this craft?
