Alphabet Stones

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities by Rosemary Lynn

Alphabet Stones at RoamingRosie.com

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.

Alphabet Stones at RoamingRosie.com

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.

Alphabet Stones at RoamingRosie.com

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.

Alphabet Stones at RoamingRosie.com 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.

Alphabet Stones at RoamingRosie.com

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. :)

Roaming Rosie Signature

21Sep2014

Letter D: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities by Rosemary Lynn

Letter D: Alphabet Activities for Kids at RoamingRosie.com

Welcome to Letter D Day!

If you haven’t read the Introduction to the Alphabet Activities, you should start there.

Don’t forget to check out the Letter D: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids, too!

Letter Sorting: D is for Dolphins {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

For our letter sorting activity, I cut out two dolphin shapes.

After gluing down the dolphins, my daughter sorted the lowercase and capital Ds and glued one onto one dolphin and the others onto the second dolphin.

D is for Dragons {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

To make some letter Ds into Dragons, I had precut the big and little D, the dragon’s heads, a wing and tale for each, plus a breath of fire for each.

D is for Daisies {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

When we did this project, my daughter was still struggling with cutting straight lines, so I precut these shapes as well.

Now that she’s a little older, I’d let her at least cut out the stems, and try to do the leaves and petals as well.

D is for Dogs Eating Doughnuts File Folder Game {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

This is another file folder game I designed and, yes, we still play this one, too.

On one sheet are the dogs and their dog dishes. On another sheet are the piles of doughnuts. You cut out the doughnuts so your kids can match them to the dogs and dishes, largest to smallest.

My daughter loves to tease me by pretending to put the wrong doughnut pile on the wrong dish and watching for my reaction. :)

You can find this free printable on my Letter D: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids post.

D is for Dots {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

Dot markers {or Dot a Dot Markers} are something we use now and again.

For this worksheet, I made letter Ds from bubble shapes that can be filled with dots from the markers.

You can find this free printable on my Letter D: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids post.

D is for Driving {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

This was loads of fun. My younger daughter, who was still crawling at the time, even got into it.

I made a capital and lowercase D on the floor with painters tape, adding small dashes inside the letter to replicate a road.

We drove the Hot Wheels through the letters like we were writing them.

You can also use the painters tape on tile or linoleum floors. Sometimes it sticks to wooden decks or concrete, if you’d prefer to do this outdoors, though I’ve had trouble when dirt gets under the tape.

D is for Dog and Dolphin {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

This was really just a fun craft that we did because my daughter loves painting so much, but we picked two animals that started with the letter D and I wrote their names on the paper to accentuate the letter.

These things are still hanging from her bathroom mirror with little suction cups.

D is for Dragon Drums {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

We also made Dragon Drums.

For the drum, I used old formula cans with the labels peeled off, but just about any type of can will work. The small one was green beans, I think. I had picked the formula can because it was large, but using two different sizes also allowed us to compare the different sounds they made.

As you can see below, we filled the cans with rice, so that they also functioned as shaker drums.

The top of the can was covered with the top half of a green balloon which I’d cut in two and secured with a rubber band.

We had cut wings and heads from green construction paper and I folded the ends up to make it easy to slide the paper under the rubber band as well.

D is for Dragon Drums {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

I let the girls beat on the drums with the ends of wooden spoons, and we shook them, too.

These dragon drums lasted a long time, even with the rough play of two young kids. And we got a lot of enjoyment out of them.

D is for Dinosaur Pizzas {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

These are seriously fun pizzas to make.

I had intended for them to be “deep dish” when I made them, but they didn’t turn out that way. I can’t remember why I still labeled them as such on the picture.

Anyway, as you can see in the step-by-step photo below, we started with my Easy Pizza Dough.

I rolled out the dough and used our Dinosaur Cutter to cut out dinosaur-shaped crusts. I carefully transferred these to a parchment lined baking pan, trying to retain the shape of the dinosaur, but making sure to leave some room between them.

I also used the dinosaur cutter to cut out pieces of cheese from slices of mozzarella cheese {the kind meant for sandwiches}.

D is for Dinosaur Pizza {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

To assemble the pizzas, we added tomato sauce to them, then sprinkled them with Parmesan cheese. I also like to add some salt, pepper, and garlic powder, but that’s optional. We topped them with the cheese slices and with a letter D that I had cut out of pepperoni.

I made the meaty letters by cutting slices of pepperoni in half and carefully using a small paring knife to carve out the center.

The cheese spread a bit when they cooked, but we didn’t mind that at all. :)

D is for Dulce De Leche Doughnuts {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

These Dulce de Leche Doughnuts were surprising good and relatively simple {although time-consuming} to make.

I’ve posted the step-by-step photo below, so you can see the process. And actually, when I say it’s time consuming, it’s only because of cutting out the letter Ds and dipping each finished D into the caramel. Not hard, but it does take a few minutes. My daughter enjoyed the process, though, so – at least to me – it was worth it.

The doughnuts themselves are pretty easy to make since they’re baked, and the caramel has only one ingredient. We topped them with nonpareil sprinkles for decoration, and though the caramel was a tad sticky, these were thoroughly enjoyed.

D is for Dulce De Leche Doughnuts {Alphabet Activities at RoamingRosie.com}

Normally I would add the entire recipe right here but this post is already pretty long, so I’m just going to post the printable recipe instead. To print out the PDF copy of the recipe, click here: Dulce de Leche Doughnuts

And here are some of the supplies I’ve mentioned in this post, including dot markers, painters tape, dinosaur cutter, and cookie cutters {for the letter D}.

I’d love for you to share if you’ve done any of these projects with your little ones!

Follow me on Facebook and Pinterest to see my latest posts.

And don’t forget to check out the Easy Pizza Dough recipe I used for the Dinosaur Pizzas:

Have fun!

Roaming Rosie Signature

5Sep2014

Letter C: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities by Rosemary Lynn

Welcome to Letter C Day!

If you haven’t read the Introduction to the Alphabet Activities, you should start there.

And don’t forget to check out the Letter C: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids, too!

For our letter sorting activity, I made two paper cars.

To make it a little easier to distinguish between the capital and lowercase Cs, I cut out the capital Cs in a slightly bigger circle than the lowercase ones.

But kids tend to be more observant than us anyway, and I’m not sure that extra step was necessary.

This paper project goes great with Letter C Day and with a reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which we read anyway.

But instead of cutting out circles for the body of the caterpillar, I cut out large letter Cs in different colors.

This is a file folder-type game that I made. And it’s one that my daughter still pulls out of the “file folder” game binder to play.

It’s a simple concept of matching the cats that are the same color, but lets you practice counting as well as color matching.

You can find the free printout on my Letter C: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids post.

This was probably my favorite activity.

I know it seems a little strange at first glance – after all, what toddler/preschooler can pronounce “cumulonimbus?”

Honestly, I struggled to say the words, too.

But, with this chart in hand, we lay in the grass and watched the clouds. We talked about the different shapes and which picture on the chart best matched the clouds we saw. We picked animals out of the floating masses and laughed as the shapes fell apart again.

My daughter still excitedly points out shapes she sees in the clouds, and her younger sister is starting to, as well.

I made this chart with photos from the NOAA and you can get the free printout on my Letter C: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids post.

After watching the clouds outdoors, we made our own.

I cut fluffy cloud shapes out of blue construction paper, which my daughter smeared with glue and covered with cotton balls.

I punched a hole at the top so we could tie a string and hang them in our living room.

This is a great project, and for many ages, too.

The version of constellations you see here was done when my daughter was a toddler. I made different shapes with glue and she sprinkled the cut out stars over the glue. The stars were made with a craft punch.

Now that she’s a preschooler, we’ve replicated the project, though a little differently. She draws the lines with a white or silver crayon on the black construction paper, dotting on glue and paper stars at important points along the path, such as where the lines intersect.

This corn sensory bin was so cool. Seriously. Have you ever been to a corn maze where they had a giant sandbox full of corn kernels that you could play in?

This was like the miniature version of that. With letter C toys to find.

What I’m trying to say is that it felt really neat. Corn is a great sensory tool because it has a wonderfully soothing feel as you move your hands through it.

And you can reuse it. This is just popcorn kernels, and we did pop them after the project was done.

The letter C items that I hid in the corn included a toy cookie, cat, car, a coin, some crayons, candles, and clothespins.

The next few crafts work for both Letter C Day and for Christmas Crafts.

For this one, I had precut some candy cane shapes from red construction paper and some strips of white paper.

My daughter glued the candy canes onto the paper and the candy cane strips on top of them.

I love using chenille {pipe cleaner} sticks for crafts. Especially since they’re something you can get at the dollar store.

For this one, we took one white and one red pipe cleaner and twisted them together. Then, we hooked over one end to make the candy cane shape.

Mine is the one on the left and my daughter’s on the right.

If you make these around Christmastime, they make adorable decorations that can be hung on furniture or the tree.

With this one, we had some discussions not just about the letter C but also about shapes.

I drew a triangle to represent the shape of a Christmas tree on the paper and we filled it with glue. My daughter filled the triangle with the large green circles for the tree and topped it the the star.

Then we drizzled glue over the tree and she sprinkled on the tiny circles for ornaments.

I cut out the star by hand and the green circles as well. If you have a large hole punch you could use that instead. For the small circle ornaments, I used a single hole punch.

And since it was winter, this decorated our fridge before I transferred it to our Alphabet Activity Binder.

This was a little something we did for fun, after discussing how both of the words Car and Cup start with the letter C.

A variation on a Shell Game, I hid two cars under the three cups, moved them around and asked her to find the cars. Not much of a challenge since the cups are all different, but it was still fun. There were lots of giggles.

These adorable Cinnamon Toast Cs were made by cutting the letter C out of Cinnamon Toast with a cookie cutter.

I made the toast with regular sandwich bread, buttered the warm toast and sprinkled it with my Cinnamon Sugar Mix. Then I pressed in the cookie cutter to get letter C shapes.

And I ate all of the “leftovers.” Of course. :)

These were quick because I used a box mix and store bought icing. I wanted to focus on the other projects and not baking from scratch – we do that enough on other days.

I made mini cupcakes and topped them with some cream cheese icing that I put in a plastic baggie with the corner snipped off. I squeezed it on top in circles.

Then I mixed some icing with green food coloring and a little more with orange food coloring.

To make the carrot shapes I took the orange colored icing, also in a small plastic baggie with the corner snipped off, and drew a squiggle pattern that was thicker at one end and slightly pointed at the other. Then I added a little dab of green icing where the “carrot” was thickest.

For dinner we had a mouthful of letter C: Chili con Carne with cheese, sour cream, and cornbread.

I made my 4 Ingredient Chili and some cornbread baked in muffin tins.

And chocolate chip cookies. Yum. How could we possibly have a day celebrating the letter C and not mention chocolate chip cookies??

C is for Cookie, that’s good enough for me…..

Anyway, while baking your favorite recipe of chocolate chip cookies, melt some chocolate chips in a baggie, snip off the corner, and draw some letter Cs onto waxed or parchment paper. Allow them to set (this only take a few minutes) and when you pull the tray of cookies out of the oven, place the chocolate C on top and press down ever so slightly. The heat from the cookie will melt the bottom of the C to help it adhere.

And here are some of the supplies I’ve mentioned in this post, including the star punch, popcorn, and cookie cutters (for the Cinnamon Toast).

I’d love for you to share if you’ve done any of these projects with your little ones!

Follow me on Facebook and Pinterest to see my latest posts.

Have fun!

22Aug2014

Letter A: Alphabet Activities for Kids

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities by Rosemary Lynn

Letter A Day was our first Alphabet Activities day.

My OCD really wouldn’t have let it happen any other way. :)

Anyway, if you haven’t read the Introduction to the Alphabet Activities, you should really start there.

And don’t forget to check out the Letter A: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids, too!

One of the first letter projects we ever did was an American flag.

And it really stuck with her.

To this day, my daughter points out the flags, excitedly shouting, “An American flag!”

The project itself was simple: I cut out red stripes, a blue rectangle, and punched out some white stars ahead of time. Then I showed my daughter a flag and she copied it in paper.

There are plenty of other flags you could do, too. Just to name a few: Austria, Australia, Argentina, and Afghanistan. Also, Alabama, Arizona, Alaska, and Arkansas.

I always do a letter sorting project where I print out both capital and lowercase letters ahead of time.

These letters were cut into apple shapes. {Don’t laugh at my apple trees!}

You could easily hand write the letters instead. Honestly, my printer gives me more trouble with construction paper…

This was a fun snack.

I cut some thin slices in an apple and used an A cookie cutter to make little apple ‘A’s.

And I ate all the scraps, too. :)

I’ve made these a bunch of times, usually for potlucks.

I’m not posting a recipe since it was all ready-made supplies {or you could substitute with your favorite homemade recipes}.

Check out the step-by-step photos:

I used a 2-inch flower shaped cookie cutter to cut pieces out of store bought pie crust. I placed the flower crusts in greased muffin tins. Then I scooped a few apples from a can of apple pie filling into the crust. I topped it with a generous sprinkle of my Cinnamon and Sugar Mix, and baked them according to the pie crust directions.

These little pies are always a hit.

Chocolate is a favorite in our house, so these chocolate acorns, it should go without saying, were also a hit.

The great thing is that they also work well for autumn-themed projects. I’m thinking of making them again around Thanksgiving.

As you can see in the photos, the ingredients are Hershey’s Kisses, mini Fudge Stripe cookies, and miniature chocolate chips.

I melted some chocolate chips in a baggy to act as the “glue” to hold it all together. Then we stuck the flat end of the Kisses onto the bottom of the cookies and let them sit for a minute to set. Then I put a drop of melted chocolate on the top of the cookies, and my daughter attached the kiss to the top.

Store covered… if you have any left.

Click here to get the free printable Letter A: Free Alphabet Worksheets for Kids.

And here are some of the supplies I’ve mentioned in this post, including the star punch, letter A cookie cutter, and fudge stripe cookies:

I’d love for you to share if you’ve done any of these projects with your little ones!

Follow me on Facebook and Pinterest to see my latest posts.

Have fun!

22Aug2014

Introduction to the ALPHABET ACTIVITIES for Kids {Start Here}

Posted in activities for kids, alphabet activities, free worksheets & printables by Rosemary Lynn

Welcome to my Alphabet Activities section!

My kids and I have been practicing the alphabet through Letter Days, exploring one letter a day through food, games, activities, and worksheets.

I originally began posting about them on Squidoo (which is now HubPages), and posted about half of the alphabet there. But that site keeps changing their format, so it’s just easier for me to redo everything here, to start from scratch. Besides, I’ve created new worksheets and edited the format of the old worksheets to make printing easier. Not only that, there’s new stuff here you won’t find there – which is why I didn’t include the links to the old articles.

For each letter, I’ll be posting about activities and recipe ideas and also a list of all the free worksheets I’ve made. The worksheets posted below are all in PDF format and are free for home and classroom use – so enjoy!

What is a Letter Day?

I would usually spend one full day doing projects on a letter, or spread it out over a few days. Although even if we did just one Letter Day, we’d still continue discussing that letter for the next couple of days.

To begin each Letter Day, we glue a letter into our alphabet binder. We have two binders that are quite full, with all of the paper activities separated by A-Z dividers.

I almost always do at least two construction paper crafts that include making a letter into something (an H into a horse or a Q into a queen, for example) and a letter sorting activity where my girls need to separate capital from lowercase letters onto two shapes.

I do cut the paper down, though, before we do the projects. I make them 8.5″ by 11″ and then use a 3 hole punch after we’re done to help them fit in the binder.

I used to cut out the construction paper pieces ahead of time, too, and just let my girls glue them on and sort the pieces however they liked. My girls are older now, though, so they can cut more of the pieces themselves. It’s up to you how you’d like to do it, depending on the age of your children.

We also do worksheets that include tracing letters, tracing lines, mazes, color matching, letter searches, and much more.

Sometimes we do a traditional craft indoors, sometimes we run around outside and dig in the dirt. And we pretty much always cook and/or bake something.

But whatever game we play or whatever food we eat, we always talk about the letters. If we’re eating gnocchi because it’s Letter G day, we take the time to find the letter G on the gnocchi package.

We usually do collages, too. But not always, so I don’t plan on including them in each post. When we started, my daughter wasn’t able to cut out shapes yet, so I spent some time cutting pictures out of magazines after she went to bed.

The finished collages looked like this:

We used apples, angels, artichokes, and an accordion for letter A; a bison, butterflies, babies, and bells for letter B; and cars, camera, cherries, and cats for letter C. Now that she’s cutting out shapes quite well on her own, though, I’m considering starting the project all over again, but letting her cut out the pictures this time.

Plus, since my girls love being outside and drawing with chalk, we also practice our letters with tracing and coloring in chalk:

Most of these projects use supplies that we have around the house or that are easy to find. Construction paper is a biggie.

Here are some of the things I’ve mentioned in this post, including construction paper, a paper cutter, a 3 hole punch, and page dividers:

But where do I find all of these projects and worksheets that you’ve mentioned?

I’m so glad you asked!

They’ll all be listed right here and under the Alphabet Activities category. I haven’t finished editing all the photos yet, but they’ll be listed here as I post them. Plus, at one point my old computer died and I lost a lot of photos. So now my oldest is a great deal older when than when I started these projects with her, and since we’ve had to redo some of them for the photos (and it’s taken me awhile to get around to posting them) you may notice some age gaps between the photos of my various blog posts. But taking three or so years to post something is just an everyday part of #momlife, right? Right??

Anyway, this is the best page to bookmark (or Pin) if you want to take full advantage of everything, since this is where you’ll find the list to all of the Letter Day activities and worksheets.

… and drum roll please …