This was a rainy Sunday activity thrown together with a old favorite pretend play prop. It’s a great alphabet activity with a focus on pretend play and part of our Alphabet For Starters series.  My son and I madethis mail boxyears ago and it had been a while since I’d dug it out of my son’s closet to play.  We added in some envelopes and letters and got down to the serious business of play!

1. Gather your materials. You will need a super cool mailbox like this one we made from a box, some envelopes, small squares of paper, markers, plain labels, and a bag or purse to use as a mail bag.
2. Start by having your child write some letters.
3. While they do that write out the envelopes with upper and lowercase letters.
4. Fill them with the letters your child writes. I filled a few with other letters as well .
5. Next add stamps. Ours were added haphazardly after my daughter demanded we find some. I just wrote STAMP on some plain labels.
6. Pop them on the envelopes.
7. Time to play. We put each letter in the mailbox stopping to read each envelope as we did.
8. When we were done she lifted the box and the play turned into receiving mail.
9. She loved opening them. Some were filled with the letters she wrote and some had more letters of the alphabet on them. Label what they open as they do. As we played some of the letters were pretend invites to parties, others were letters from grandparents and one was a bill which cracked me up.

Alphabet Books

Find our 50 favorite alphabet books for kids in this big round up of books. Do you have a favorite?