Alphabet Fun

Fun with Food - using food can be a fun way to teach your child the alphabet. There are two great ways to do this. 1. Alphabet Food - Watch nutritional content with some brands but alphabet cookies are an engaging way to have your toddler help identify letters. Alphabet soup is another fun food. You can make it even more hands on by having your child help make alphabet cookies (and you can control the ingredients more).
2. Show and Tell - Be sure to say the letter the food begins with to reinforce learning. For example, when you give your child a banana, say "A is for apple." Using different foods, such as "A is also for apricot" will help your child to learn that the same letter can start various words.

Alphabet Learning Books - check out our suggested reading list or submit your ideas

Alphabet Crafts - hands-on crafts are engaging for children and enhance learning. Here are some of our favorites:
1. Make an alphabet book of your own. Decide on what letter you will work on and then find different versions of that letter as well as pictures of objects starting with that letter in newspapers, magazines or print from your computer. For example, let's say we're doing the letter A. So you would find upper and lowercase A's of different fonts and sizes. You would also look for "A" words such as apple, alligator, aquarium, etc. Cut them out and help your child glue them onto a piece of paper to make a kind of collage. Be sure to say the letter and the words out loud. You can also cut and paste words to go with the pictures (ie the word apple to paste next to a picture of an apple). Put the finished paper in a book - a 3-ring binder is probably the easiest but you can be creative here, too.
2.Decorating Fun - many craft stores sell wooden cut out letters. Buy the letter you've decided to focus on and let your child decorate or paint the letter. The nice thing here is the child doesn't have to be perfect with the paint. This is a quick and easy activity to reinforce other alphabet learning activities.
3. Stickers, Stickers! - You can keep it simple and just buy different kinds of alphabet stickers (many craft & Dollar stores carry them) and pick a letter to have your child peel and stick to a sheet of paper or foam. The key is to get stickers of different shapes and even textures (like the bubble or foam stickers). You can also buy assorted stickers (foam, etc) for a particular letter them (i.e. buy a tub of foam princess stickers for "P is for Princess"). You can also use stickers to help your child spell their name, a simple way to help them learn to recognize their name.