Letter Crafts to Encourage Learning Basic Phonics

When I was in school anything that included scissors and glue was the most awesome lesson. Add some crayons and googly eyes and you had me. These days I don't see a lot of that, and being an overly crafty person it makes me really sad that we don't always get to encourage more creativity in our kids. (Yes, I was that 6th grade math teacher making foldables and my classroom had almost as many craft supplies as a pre-k class...)

One of the perks of homeschooling my smallest kids is that I get to experiment and find what works best for them, usually adding crayons and glue to nearly everything we do. One of the things I tried was using letter crafts to emphasize letter sounds, hoping the activities would be fun for them but also helping them recognize the letter forms and sounds. 

And it worked. 

We started with a turkey craft around Thanksgiving, right after my daughter had turned 3. She already knew most of her letters, so we mostly did it just as a review. I made a point to emphasize the "t" sound throughout the craft, and I was surprised at how well it stuck. For the next six months (at least) whenever I asked her what sound the letter T made she responded with "t,t,t, like turkey!"

After we made our lowercase t I found some fall colored feathers at the craft store. Of course we had to use them for something, so since little brother is still working on his uppercase letters we reviewed the capital T and made turkeys using the feathers. Using turkeys for both was a great way to reinforce the idea that even though they look a little different, they are also the same and make the same sound.

I'm definitely not saying this is a miracle method, but the first letter my youngest recognized was also his first letter craft. I know not all kids will be learn through this activity, but any time I can enforce concepts and relate to real life in a fun way, I'm all about it.

We create our letter crafts in a few different ways. To make a quick and easy activity we cover a blank letter with objects beginning with that letter. They can all be the same object (covering an h with hearts), or different objects beginning with that sound (covering the letter m with pictures of moons, mice, milk - this makes a great scavenger hunt!) We covered this S with plastic spiders for Halloween.

They can also be turned into objects or animals. This apple was a great way to incorporate the letter a, and it works for upper and lower case!

You can even use the five senses - we love creating letters with dimension, like this "O for oatmeal" activity we did during our farm unit. It would also be great for an apple unit alongside an apple pie sensory bin!

We hang our letter crafts on our display wall while we work on that unit, then they go into a notebook like this for reference. I know this will also make a super cute keepsake one day!

Here are a few of our other favorite letter crafts!

This super-fun rainbow:

Our handprint reindeer:

This lowercase bee:

A handprint Jack-o-lantern:

This Cheerio octopus:

As you can see, we like to have fun with our letters. Not only do these crafts make learning the alphabet exciting, but they also reinforce letter sounds and help get my kids ready to begin reading! So grab some crayons and glue and go teach those letters!

(If you don't want to spend time creating your own letters, you can find them in my Teachers Pay Teachers store here.)