I love sticky notes. I have ever since my days in the classroom. In fact, I remember one year for Christmas a family gifted me a huge basket full of pens and various sized and shaped sticky notes and I was actually over the moon excited. It felt like Christmas morning as a child!

Now I recognize most people likely don’t have this same feeling towards sticky notes, but I bet you will still love these 3 ways to learn and play with them!

And if you do, you are sure to love Play into Kindergarten Readiness. This program for 2 to 3-year-olds involves only ONE 20-minute activity per day and covers ALL core skills! Please check it out right here: Play into Kindergarten Readiness. 

Ready to get playing? Grab out those sticky notes! If you don’t have sticky notes, of course, you can simply cut up some pieces of paper and put a little piece of tape at the top of each one. But please consider buying yourself some sticky notes next time you are at the dollarstore… they simply make life better…

3 Ways to Play and Learn with Sticky Notes

1. Pop Them on the Stairs

Grab those sticky notes and decide on one skill you would like to practice with your little one. Perhaps you are learning letters, or numbers, or colours, or days of the week, or… anything! Then pop those skills on the sticky notes and stick them to the stair risers. Each and every time you go up the stairs together you can call out those sticky notes.

You can also throw balled-up socks or beanbags and call out the number or letter you hit when you toss them!

If you have letters on the stairs, I suggest starting with your child’s name letters. You could put one letter on each step and call it out as you go up. Once your child knows the letter names, start practicing the letter sounds as well. After she is comfortable with both, you can go on with additional letters of the alphabet. I suggest teaching them in this order: The Order for Teaching Letter Recognition.

2. Go on an ABC Scavenger Hunt

Take 26 sticky notes and write out the alphabet, one letter per sticky note. Now hide those sticky notes all over the house (or even just in one room). Have your child try to find all 26 sticky notes and place them in ABC order. Of course, if your little one is just starting out on this letter learning journey they will not yet know all of their letters. To support children at this stage, write the alphabet out in the correct order on a piece of paper (or 26 more sticky notes!) and have your child match the letters on top as they find them.

If your child is at the stage where they are learning to match uppercase and lowercase letters, you can write all of the hidden sticky notes in lowercase and the letters to place those letters on top of in uppercase.

You can also do this activity with just your child’s name letters, just one “grouping” of the letters, or with numbers!

3. Play a Colour Match Game

Grab sticky notes of all different colours, it’s time for a colour match game! If you don’t have a variety of colours of sticky notes, you can simply use different colours of markers on each sticky note. Have one red, orange, yellow, green, blue, pink, purple, black, grey, and any other colour you like! Now give your child one sticky note and have them go on a hunt to find that colour somewhere in the house and stick it on top.

You can even write the colour word on the sticky note (in that colour of marker) so your child gets used to seeing that sight word. So you could write the word “Blue” with a blue marker.

And there you have it! Three easy and simple ways to play and learn with sticky notes.

These are the kinds of daily activities you will find in Play into Kindergarten Readiness. All you need is to find a 20-minute block of time each day to do one play-based activity with your child. It is really that easy! I have done all of the work for you. You will know what to teach, how to teach it, and exactly when. All you have to do is play!

If you have any questions about my program, or about any of these Play 3 Ways ideas, please leave a comment below as I am so happy to help!

And don’t forget your Day-by-Day Preschool plan, including monthly Play 3 Ways ideas found in Play into Kindergarten Readiness!

 

Thank you so much for learning and playing alongside me, sweet friend!
xo

Sarah