Okay this little activity was so much fun! It is a perfect way to practice letters in a little ones name. You barely need any supplies and it feels like an extravagant game and art project by the time your doing the activity!
Supplies
- Paper
- Scissors
- Tape
- Paint (or other coloring tool)
Set up
- Cut out the letters to your child’s name. (I did this for joy school so I just cut out the first letter to each child’s name.)
- Tape the letters around your house, or a room. This should feel like a treasure hunt.
- Set up a decorating area at the table. I used watercolors. Anything should work, but I would be careful to not let the paper letter get TOO heavy with added decorations.
Activity Time
I had the girls in a little circle and I told them that I had hid an important letter around the preschool room for each of them. I thought I might have to explain a little more, my joy school sweeties are mostly in their early 3’s, but right away a child pointed excitedly at the S on the chalkboard. As the children found letters I would have them YELL out the letter name. I also helped them sort whose letter was whose. If I were doing this with my child I would have her lay down the letters on the floor or table so we could sort each letter of her name.
This part was such a blast. They LOVED finding the letters. I had even hid 2 extra letters, that didn’t belong to anyone, so they had to think through their name and chose not to grab the strange letter.
After we found all the letters we took our letters over to the table to decorate them.
At this point I had announced it was FREE PLAY but every one of the girls sat right down to decorate their letters. I did a lot of extra letter talk during this play. “Oh I see a lot of black on your P.” “Wow, are you turning your S into a rainbow?” “What letter are you decorating?” Short of repetitively chanting their letter I was constantly repeating them. This is a simple trick to help encourage MORE learning out of simple play. TALK!
TIP!!!! Make sure your sweet child is decorating the right side of the letter….I had a teacher failed didn’t check Genevieve’s G! Oops.
I had talked about the letter M at circle time in the morning and I was SOO grateful I had cut out some extra M’s because one silly letter was not enough for these girls. They went on happily painting for 30 minutes! It was amazing.
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