Alphabet Learning Activities

Since my son is very nearly three, I’m slowly starting to add more purposeful learning to his play. We’ve been using our Hape Alphabet Puzzle and Qubes for some alphabet learning activities. We’ve also used them for a matching game, which I shared before, and some sorting activities.

I’m a bit obsessed with finding toys that lend themselves to open-ended play. Whatever I buy for my kids, I try to be sure that it has at least two different uses. And these Qubes have proven to be quite versatile!

I took a few photos while we were playing the other day. The Hape Alphabet Puzzle is one of my son’s favorites and it always stays out on his shelf. He also loves the Qubes and one day we decided to play with both together. I can’t even remember whose idea it was, but we started matching the animals to their initial letter and that’s how it started.

He enjoys balancing the animals on top of their letter and making the letter’s sound while he does it. I prefer to stress the sounds that letters make instead of their name.

There are two main schools of thought when it comes to reading instruction. One is Phonics, which teaches readers to “sound out” words by their letters. The other is Whole Language, which focuses more on learning words by sight. This method was all the rage in the 80s and if you’re around 30-ish, then chances are you learned to read with Whole Language like I did. The rationale for this over Phonics is that English is a tricky language that’s built on borrowed words from other languages that don’t always follow the same set of rules.

Today there’s more of a preference to Phonics along with high-frequency sight words like “the,” “of,” and “through.” I tend to prefer this way– giving children the tools to break apart words into sounds but also recognizing that many words must just be learned and understood. That’s why I start with the sounds. And why when my son sees the letter T he says, “Mama, tiger!”

Using the Hape Qubes Farm Animals, Jungle Parade, and Under the Sea, we can match an animal to most every letter. He’s pretty accurate! I don’t want to make a huge deal about being right and wrong, so if he puts an animal on the wrong letter I just pick it up and move it to the right one while making the correct sound.

Some letters have more than one animal that can match to them. This doesn’t seem to be confusing to my little learner and I like the variety. We can pull out a few letters for sound sorting. Once he’s adept at this, we can try out some blends with SH for sheep and shark.

We have also started talking about colors. The Qube animals come in such vibrant colors it’s easy to arrange them by color. We might also branch out to sorting by other characteristics, but the alphabet seems to be the most interesting thing to him right now.

What early literacy activities do you/have you done with your little one? Tell me I’m not the only one who feels overwhelmed by the task of teaching someone to read!