Toss away the piles of worksheets and instead use hands-on fun with your younger kids to help them learn letters and numbers. Spend a week or two gathering materials to make these simple learning games and your preschoolers and kindergarteners will have a blast!
Learn to Identify Letters
You can buy a fancy curriculum to help your kids learn letters and numbers, or you can engage your little learners in some hands-on fun. They’ll get to practice their fine motor skills with some of these activities as well. And most of them use simple materials to get the job done.
Here are a few simple projects to help your kids learn their letters.
The Seek-N-Find Alphabet Tube only requires a few materials to create. Your kids will get to practice their letter recognition even if you’re in the car or at an appointment or decide to take homeschooling outside for the day! Grab this fun activity and your kids will be recognizing their alphabet in no time.
Here’s what you need:
- plastic water bottle, empty (or plastic tube)
- colored or plain rice
- letter beads
- hot glue gun
- alphabet card printable
- dry erase markers
Your preschooler can even help create this hands-on activity! And if you laminate the alphabet card printable, your children can use it over and over again.
You can practice identifying letters and sounds with the Robot Alphabet Cruncher. All you need is a toilet paper tube and letters cut from a magazine. Your child can pick a letter (or you can call out a letter), say the sound the letter makes, and finally – feed it to the robot! It’s a fun hands-on activity that is much more engaging than filling out a worksheet.
Learn to Use Letters to Make Simple Words
Once your kids have learned to identify the different letters and their sounds, they can move on to building simple 3-letter words.
If you’re looking for phonics activities that your younger kids can work on while you’re homeschooling older siblings or getting some laundry done, then take some time to put together this 3 Letter Lacing Busy Bag. It’s a great hands-on activity to have on hand when you need to pull it out to keep your littles busy, but with an educational twist.
Here’s all you need:
- pipe cleaners
- letter beads
- letter lacing printable
- small plastic bag
Bonus: your littles will be exercising those fine motor skills while learning their letters!
Learn Numbers
Helping your younger kids learn letters and numbers can be engaging and fun with these creative ideas. When kids learn in a hands-on way, they’re more engaged, and more likely to remember what they learn. Put aside your pile of boring worksheets and try these ideas instead.
Kids love pretend play! All you need is an empty cardboard box, a cash register printable, some crayons and some tape to make a Pretend Cash Register.
Your little learners can practice counting with a Clothespin Counting Card activity. While this one is Valentine’s themed, you could create themes to match any time of year. Here are some other ideas:
- apples for the beginning of the school year
- pumpkins or leaves in the fall
- snowflakes and snowmen
- Christmas trees and gifts
- Shamrocks
- Flowers in the spring
- Seashells in the summer
This is such an easy activity to create that you really could make several for each new season or holiday to keep things feeling new and fresh.
If you have some construction paper, glue, and pompoms on hand, your child can practice Counting Caterpillars.
Or try this cute Rainy Day Counting activity when you’re stuck inside. The tutorial has so many variations of how to play. All you need is paper, markers, and some objects to count. Tuck this game away and pull it out when you need a quick activity to help your kids learn their numbers.
Find more ideas like these at KiwiCo to help your younger kids learn letters and numbers with hands-on fun.
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