When my son started eating solids I made all his food… you can guess that is not the case with my daughter as I have this many baby food jar lids waiting to be made into something. I am just happy we made something useful like this letter game since they can’t be recycled like the jars can. This took me 5 minutes to make and $1 for the foam letter stickers. Frugal, Educational, Earth Friendly-ish ( foam letters are probably not eh?) and fun! Oh and super simple for the uncrafty or crazy busy .Oh and if your child is not ready for letters yet do colors, if they are way past letters try sight words. This idea can be adapted to any ability.
- Gather your materials. You will need some foam letter stickers and many jar lids (or milk jug caps would work too). You may want to do the whole alphabet, but I didn’t bother letters work in all different combinations and you don’t need the whole alphabet each time you do activities with letters. You may also want a wet cloth to wipe any lids that didn’t get washed as well as you’d hoped.
- Peel and stick letters into the insides of the lids.
- Add them for each lid.
- Play.
For beginners play with the letters facing up saying only “Can you find…” giving hints using the color and what letters it’s next to.
- For more experienced kids play face down. My 4.5-year-old needed more help than I thought he would, not naming the letters but understanding he needed to remember where letters were. He also had a hard time flipping the lids with Grandma’s gloves Batman gloves on.
- Yay, a match!
Alphabet Books
Quilt Alphabet Lesa Cline- Ransome is a really pretty alphabet book that makes me think of autumn afternoons, my husband’s grandma ( she quilts) and crave caramel apples even though it’s not a strictly autumn book. Every page is devoted to a letter and the short poem that accompanies it never tells readers exactly what the letter represents, instead readers must figure it out. It’s not too hard though because the stunning illustrations in bright warm colors wonderfully give it away for every letter. My kids both liked it although my son was hoping that S would be for Superman explaining that he grew up on a farm in Kansas.
A Was an Apple Pie by Etienne Deslessert takes the classic nursery rhyme and adds odd dinosaurish aardvark creatures to it. I personally thought the creatures were odd to the point of distraction, but my son gobbled up this book and loved the creatures. Yet another reason I don’t just read the books themselves, just cause I think something is odd doesn’t mean kids will. I really like the text to this because it’s simplicity is as brilliant as how it uses both all the upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet easily. Also, because it’s such an old rhyme there are words we don’t often see in children’s contemporary literature and offers some new additions to your child’s vocabulary too.
“A” Was Once An Apple Pie by Edward Lear and Suse MacDonald is an adaptation of the classic Edward Lear poem that had both my children transfixed. The bold bright colors kept my daughter who is 10 months old wide eyed the whole time and the playful way Suse MacDonald adapted the text had my son listening from A-Z as well. It was incredibly fun to read allowed tongue tying me at times which resulted in us all giggling hysterically in a heap. A book that can do that is a must have in my opinion.
kate from an amazing child says
Oh, I LOVE his batman suit. What a cutie! This is a great way to reuse non-recylcables. My little man (25mths) is just starting to recognise letters so i think it is almost time for an activity like this. I do have a lot of foam letters but hmmm no lids. Sure I can come up with something else though 🙂 Nice idea.
Jenae {I Can Teach My Child!} says
What a great idea! We did something similar with the plastic baby food containers a while back. http://www.icanteachmychild.com/2010/07/letter-boxes-scavenger-hunt.html
admin says
That is a great next step Jenae , I love hunts for learning.
Lori says
Thank you! I can’t wait to put this together, I already saved a bunch of jars and wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with them 🙂
Amy says
We have done something similar, I just wrote the letter on many different metal lids with a sharpie, then I put them in water, and they use a magnetic fishing pole from some of their puzzles to ‘fish’ for letters, and then they match the letters to a poster I got at the dollar store. Works great for my 2 and 3 year old boys!
Zsera says
I was looking for alphabet books. Thanks!
Laila/SignificantlySimple.com says
What a great idea!! I’m definitely going to try something like this out. Thanks for posting/sharing this!
~Laila 😀
librarymama says
The little lids from frozen juice work great for this as well!
Denine says
I have used frozen orange juice lids for letter “fishing.” I started by writing letters on them with Sharpie pens. Then I stuck thematic stickers on them for my one-year-olds and as they did their “fishing” we would name the sticker and build vocabulary. 🙂 LOTS of ideas!
madden 17 coins says
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