My girls are like me:  they love rocks.

So I decided to incorporate some rocks into our activities.

I drew all the letters of the alphabet onto 26 stones, uppercase on one side and lowercase on the other.

They’re kind of like story stones, but with only one letter on each rock.

At first, because I had the stones and a permanent marker at the house, but no paint pen, I drew the letters with the marker.

I thought it might rub off, and I was right.  So, a few days later when I got a Michael’s coupon in the paper, I went and picked up a black paint marker.  I used it to trace over the letters, and it looked about the same.  But the paint didn’t come off when we played with them.

You can find rocks like these in the floral section of most stores.  I got mine at the dollar store.

I love being able to learn while exploring outdoors.

There are many ways to play with the alphabet stones, and one of the things we did was dump them in the grass and then dig them out one at a time.

We shouted out the letter on the stone as the girls pulled them from the lawn.

We do play with them inside, too, but outdoors is preferable.

I’m so happy it’s fall and we can be outside more.

Anyway, my 4yo also plays a game where she finds all of the letters of her name and puts them in order {see below}.

This has helped her with writing her name, as well.  She would often mix up the order of the letters when writing it, and she even put the stones in the wrong order a few times – like spelling out her name from right to left instead of left to right even though she can spell it aloud perfectly.

But since we’ve been playing with these stones, she’s been writing her name correctly nearly every time.

These stones are also great for practicing phonics.  You can put a sound like “-at” on the ground and make a pile of letters that go with it to make different words:  cat, hat, bat, sat, mat, etc.

My 4yo loves to rhyme, so she has a lot of fun with things like that.

I keep the alphabet stones in a little mesh bag in the playroom, and sometimes the girls pull them out and play with them on their own.

Which is pretty awesome.  :)