Alphabet Sticker Sort

As our "staycation" stretched on this week Big Brother started to need something new to perk him up. Luckily I had this alphabet activity up my sleeve.

He's been really interested in what letters different words start with, so this activity really matched a place he's been at in terms of his pre-reading skills. He's also been pretty solidly remembering the sounds each letter can make, which means he was able to tackle this with only a little guidance. 

Materials:

Poster board

Permanent Marker

Several pages of different stickers/sticker sets

First, I created a large gird onto the poster board. (I used a yard stick to measure our grid out, but it's not necessary.) I found it easier to create a 5 x 5 grid and have two letters share a space than a grid that had space for 26 squares. (Which would have meant going over, probably one with 28 squares.)

I lettered each square with the letters of the alphabet, including both the capital and lowercase letters. 

I definitely have a sticker "thing," especially when they're cheap I can't resist buying them. So we've developed quite a collection of stickers. I pulled out a selection of different sheets for Big Brother to use.  

I hung up the chart and explained how he could use it. First, choose a sticker from the sticker set. Say the word to figure out what sound it started with, and then match the sound to the letter on the chart. Once he'd figured that out, he put the sticker in that square. 

Once he got going, Big Brother worked pretty independently. I started to cook dinner, and he would call out to me if he got stumped on a sticker and the sound the word started with. But otherwise he pretty much worked on his own. 

He wanted to try and get at least one sticker for every letter, but even though he worked on it for quite a while, we didn't quite get there. We're keeping it hanging up though so he can add to it later if he finds other stickers.

Besides working on letters and sounds, the sticker part itself is a great fine motor activity. 

At another point, he started counting and comparing sticker amounts, looking to see which letter had the most stickers and which still were missing some stickers. 

And although he was not ready for the sticker sorting part, Little Brother really wanted to participate in some way. So he got to decorate his name with stickers. Peeling off stickers is one of his favorite activities (and a great quiet activity for toddlers in general) so he stuck with it for quite a while. 

We're hoping to come back to our sticker chart again over the next month and see how many more stickers and sounds we can match. 

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