Play Create Explore: Letter & Number Heart Clothesline

We've been doing a lot of fun learning activities that focus on lower case letters. I found these cardstock hearts at the dollar store and wrote each lowercase letter of the alphabet on one side, and for some extra number practice, I wrote the numbers 1-20 on the back of 20 of the letter hearts.

To practice letter and number recognition and sequencing, I made a clothesline game using the hearts, some yarn and clothespins.

I tied some yarn from one chair to another to make the clothesline.

I spread the letters out in random order on our table. We would sing the alphabet together and I would stop at the letter BEFORE the letter he was looking for to give him a chance to think of it himself. Once he verbalized what letter he was looking for, he had to find that letter on the table. I gave him time to find it himself and helped when he needed it. It also gave me the opportunity to see what letters he's struggling with recognizing which are not suprisingly b,d, p, and q.

When he found the letter he would clip it on the line which was great

fine motor skill and coordination practice!

He was SO proud when he finished the whole alphabet that he ran to kiss his

little brother who'd been contently watching the whole time :)

The next day we did the same thing with the numbers side of the hearts.

L knows how to count from 1-20 but what I realized by doing this activity was that he didn't recognize what numbers 11-20 actually looked like! So this was great number recognition and sequencing practice!