10 ways to learn letters

Emilia has been working on her letter recognition for about a year now. I have taught her letter names and sounds at the same time but more often than not she will say the sound a letter makes. We have purely worked on this through play and having fun together and it’s never been forced. She just simply loves letters and is starting to apply them in reading and writing.

To support children learning letters and sounds, they need to tune in their listening skills too by matching sounds to objects (for example animal noises), continue rhyming in stories, match toys initial sounds, apply alliteration, etc.

When I started introducing letters to Emilia, we began with letters that represented something of meaning to her; mainly family members. We started with E, M, D and O but she soon began to recognise other letters for her aunts, uncles and cousins. This differs to when I teach it at school because I use Letters and Sounds and start with the usual ‘SATPIN’. Also choose what interests your child, whether it’s animals, Thomas the Tank engines, Disney princess etc Just incorporate letters into your usual play and they will begin to grasp them and talk about them too.

Below are 10 ways to play with letters to support letter recognition. You will notice I use a range of letter resources and some are in upper and some lower case this is purely down to choice and that I want her to be able to recognise both.

1. MAGAZINE HUNT: This is a quick activity that doesn’t require much preparation. Write some letters on paper for your child to hunt for in old magazines. Try a mixture of letters they know and a few they don’t to encourage confidence.

2. LETTER SENSORY BOTTLE: Fill a bottle with anything that can conceal the letters, rice works well. Then add letters for them to find, I used some scrabble like tiles and beads but letters written on card would work too. Then they have a list to hunt for, ticking them off as they go.

3. WATER SQUIRT: This is a great one for some summer fun. Write up chalk letters for your children to squirt off. I teamed it with our ‘Learning Resources’ phase 2 dice but you could simply just let them at it, calling out the letters as they get hit or disappear. 

4. LETTERS IN SMALL WORLD: Below is just one example of how you can team small world play and letters. Add letters onto everyday objects and get children to hunt for them. One of Emilia’s favourites was labelled pebbles at the seaside. 

5. LETTER SCAVENGER HUNT: This is a great independent play activity. Giving letters for children to find objects to take pictures of. A bit like eye spy but with the added fun of technology. An active way to get children to use their tablets too. 

6. PLAY DOUGH PLAY: I love play dough and I incorporate letters and numbers frequently. Adding a range of letter resources to a few colours of play dough is a great introduction to letters as they create imprints and patterns. Try making imprints and getting children to find the matching letters to fit. 

7. SILLY SOUP: There are so many variations of this game but one I have played recently is finding objects with a matching initial sound in the ‘soup’. This can be adapting to include objects with digraphs (two letters that make one sound e.g. ‘sh’) as they get older. I teamed it with some alphabet cards we have collected from inside the snacks from  ‘Bear Nibbles’ fruity paws. 

8. PRESENT UNWRAP: Most kids love unwrapping presents and wrapping objects in foil is quick and easy. Wrap familiar items like these wooden animals from a puzzle. I put labels with initial sounds in bold to support reading and matching.

9. CAR WASH: This is truly the girls favourite summer activity, although we have braved it in winter too with warm water, wellies and rain coats. Cover the car in letters using a bath crayon and then get them to scrub off the letters using sponges and cloths. 

10. Finally, labelling plastic/paper cups is a simple and cheap resource that has so much flexibility. You can tower them, play skittles, order them to spell words, play a child version of beer pong etc.

For many more letters activities check out @myteachermummyandme on instagram and why not join in and use the hashtag #letters_learning to share your ideas too.