My kids have been way into their Bingo games lately and it seemed like the only version we didn’t have is an Alphabet version. Well, I changed that this morning! I made one by hand. I probably could have easily created one to print out but it was just easier to freehand it. I wasn’t sure how well my kids would enjoy this but they LOVED it. Sylas especially. It was perfect for matching the letters and also working on recognizing them. We used cheerios at our bingo markers. A bunch of them were eaten by Josie but that’s okay.
So to make this game, I cut squares out of orange paper. You can use any color you want, of course. Then I used a pencil to draw lines, creating 16 boxes. Four vertical lines and four horizontal. When I was content with my lines (they’re still not perfect but that’s okay), I drew over them with a black marker. In the boxes, I wrote letters. I made two boards and I made sure to get all 26 letters somewhere on the two of them, then I filled in the extra boxes with letters that weren’t on that board yet.
Then I cut out 26 small pieces of paper and wrote one letter on each piece of paper. I put these pieces into a small bowl and began pulling slips of paper from the bowl. I read the letter aloud and asked if either of the kids had that letter. Sylas was able to recognize quite a few letters without having to match my piece of paper to the letters on his board, and Josie was able to identify ‘A’ and ‘J’ without matching. For the letters they didn’t know, I sat my piece of paper with the letter on it in between their boards and let them match it up.
This is seriously my new favorite way to learn letters. I really feel like it’s going to help them learn, and they have a lot of fun playing. I didn’t want to reward them with candy or anything like that so I just excitedly announced the winner and that was enough for them. Then I let them eat their cheerios.
Tell me about some learning games you’ve created for your littles!
