Magazine Letter Hunt

What’s better than an activity that involves letter recognition, cutting, and gluing? An activity that the kids LOVE and one that holds their attention for a while, right? What if I told you this activity does ALL OF THAT?

I’m serious.

I was inspired by Playful Learning in the Early Years. She did this activity on a poster-size scale and with each letter written out on one big piece of paper. The kids lined up their cut out letters next to the written letter.

My kids only know a handful of letters, though, so I thought writing them ALL out at once would overwhelm them. For this activity I wanted to work on letter H. No reason, really, it’s just one of the letters that they didn’t really know yet. I plan on doing this same activity with pretty much every letter of the alphabet at some point.

I took a single sheet of paper and wrote the letter H at the top of the page in both uppercase and lowercase. I handed the kids scissors, glue sticks, and a stack of magazines and asked them to find H’s, cut them out, and glue them to their paper. Sylas was able to do it all on his own and I worked with Josie on hers. Josie only wanted to do like, three H’s and then got distracted by pretty shoes and started cutting out the entire outfit. At least she focused on the letters for a little bit.

I guess this is also a good time to talk about when activities don’t go as planned. Josie literally covered up most of her letters with a giant picture of an actress’ outfit… THAT’S OKAY. She still took something from the activity.. we talked about and looked for the letter H, and she was able to pick some of them out herself. She also worked on fine motor concepts. Cutting, gluing, using her pinching fingers when needed, and also she made a little collage. She’s happy with what she created, she learned, she worked on other concepts, and she enjoyed herself. It’s totally okay if your child doesn’t do exactly what you had envisioned.