by Jane Allyson

Created on: October 20, 2009

One of the most effective ways that a child can learn to spell is through a kinesthetic approach and alphabet craft projects can help tremendously by allowing the children to learn their letters in a fun and stimulating environment.

Young children have a fairly low attention span so activities must be easy to do and give instant results to allow an optimum absorbion of information. The most important consideration is that the task is fun and allows an element of interaction.

Encouraging a sense of independence is an important consideration for any kind of learning, and so it would be useful to include follow on tasks to build on the alphabet knowledge that they already have.

Alphabet cards

This activity is best performed as a group effort. Take 52 pieces of stiff white card and cut them into appropriate sized oblongs. Taking colored pens such as felt tips and markers pens, divide each oblong into two by drawing a line from top to bottom with the card sitting width ways.

Divide the pieces of card among the group so that they all have an even amount of card to work with. Demonstrate the letters of the alphabet and encourage each child to draw a letter on the left hand side of the card in upper case and the right hand side in lower case. Continue to do this until all of the pieces have been used up. The cards can be colored in and decorated.

Encourage the children to swap cards and talk about the letters that they have written.

Follow on task:

Test knowledge by laying all the cards on the table face down. This is a game played such as you would a game of patience. Each child is asked to pick up two cards to see if they can match two cards the same. When two are matched they are put aside until another two are found. The game continues until all the cards have been found and the child with the most cards is deemed the winner.

Letter collage

Templates made from stiff card or wood can be very useful for allowing the children a chance to become familiar with the different shape of each letter. Provide a wide variety of material such as denim and felt and allow the children to draw around the letter shapes to create letters of different colors and textures.

Provide a large enough area so that the letters can be stuck down on card to give a display. Next, provide cutting up materials that have lots of different images such as old books, magazines or Internet resources that the children can cut images from to match the letters on the display.

Follow on task:

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