We love name puzzles and name activities at our house.  Sammy has shown a big interest in learning his letters and I want to keep this interest in learning – so I am introducing letters in fun and playful ways.  I bought a few colouring books for an upcoming trip and thought of a neat way of teaching letter recognition by using a colouring book

This activity was super easy and set up in seconds.  It is very much like a simplified version of colour by number – except it uses letters.  And it is one of those great activities that can be used for any child at any stage of recognizing letters.  For this activity we used Sam’s name letters, but we have used this activity since teaching letter recognition for most of the alphabet.

We are still on upper case letters, but as long as Sammy’s interest in the alphabet continues we will be starting lower case letters soon.  I love letting Sam explore and learn through play, and truthfully I had not intended on doing much alphabet recognition while Sam was 3.  But I am a believer in following a child’s lead and interests!  And right now he is very eager to learn his ABCs.

Teaching letter recognition through this activity is so simple:

First I chose some letters and wrote them on the colouring page (S was on Big Bird, A was on his shorts, M was a fish, etc.)

Then I gave each letter a colour by writing the letters again at the bottom of the page and drawing with a marker beside them (S was yellow, etc).

And then Sam was able to start his letter recognition and colouring!  He really enjoyed this activity and even created more colouring pages with letters on his own.  He would ask me to write some letters on his page, and then assign each letter a colour on his own.

I love being able to add something simply to an activity to make it something entirely new.

The colouring books will be fun to use on our travels, and when my kids grow tired of them, we can add in some letter recognition teaching to change it up!