We’re Going on a Letter Hunt! {Activity Tuesday}

Yesterday I was driving my daughter to her first day of Summer School. It was also her first day with her new teacher! She was SO very excited!

That morning she found some random advertisement card and just had to bring it to school to share. On the way to school she was “reading” the card to me and I realized that she was naming many of the letters in her own name. “E, E, A, S.” This got me pretty excited. You see…E hasn’t really been that into learning letters until recently. I have tried on and off since she turned two but it just wasn’t her thing. She would rather dress up in a tutu and push her babies around in the grocery cart as she talks on the “phone” to her friends.

I get it. That is WAY cooler than learning the letters of the alphabet.

But hearing her talk about the letters in her name inspired me to offer her a letter activity today and she jumped on it immediately! AND she really enjoyed it! We went on a letter hunt.

Where you might ask? Well in a Pottery Barn Kids Catalog of course!

What it targets

• Letter ID
• Fine motor skills
• Visual attention
• Spelling skills

What you need

• Some old magazines or catalogs
• Scissors
• Glue
• Paper
• Other crafty stuff if you wish

How to go on your OWN letter hunt

• Write the letters of your child’s name on a piece of paper. I wrote them in upper case and lower case. I did this for both of my kids names and E went for the “hunt”
• Start flipping through the magazine and “hunt” for groups of decent sized letters. When you find a good set, place the paper with your child’s name letters under and have her try to “hunt” for the letters of her name within the page.
• To make it simple, we “hunted” for one letter at a time. I would pick a letter in her name, point to it, name it, and ask her to see if she could find one that matched.
• Once your child finds a match, cut out the letter and set it aside. (Since my daughter isn’t great with scissors I did all the cutting)
• Once you have all the letters of your child’s name, glue them on a piece of paper. You can cut out as MANY letters and paste them on your paper as you like. I had hoped to do more than we did but my daughter was looking forward to another activity we were going to do next, so we just did each child’s name once (and found a few extra letters also).
• After, I let the kids decorate the paper with some left over valentines foam letters and hearts. These are great to target fine motor skills as you have to peel the stickers off the back and then place them on the paper. Feel free to let them decorate them with whatever you have lying around!

Yup, that’s it….pretty simple! My daughter really did LOVE this. We may need to start going on more letter hunts!