alphabet matching

When I first saw foam stickers, I have to say I was a little cynical.  They seemed like a terribly inefficient and excessive way to design stickers just so that they would have 1/8" of hight above the page.  But over the past few months doing stickers with my 2 1/2 - 3 year old boy, I have become a convert.  Not because they are extra special and pretty- but because he can peel the back off by himself.  Maybe other 3 year olds can do this with flat stickers, but not my boy.  He can do the foam stickers, but it still takes him FOREVER.

So when I found packages of number and letter foam stickers in the dollar bins at Target, I snapped them up.  I didn't know for what, but I figured I would come up with something.

I stashed them away until I figured out what would be the perfect thing to do with them.  And then, of course, Jonathan found them while was cooking dinner and holding a screaming up baby.  He wanted to play with them NOW.  So I had to come up with something fast and dirty- and here it is.  I drew the letters on graph paper (because it was what was handy).  And pulled out one sticker for each letter of the alphabet.

The goal was for him to match the letters and then stick the sticker on the page at the proper spot. Simple.  Easy.  Low time commitment for me; high engagement for him.  It got him thinking about the exact shape of each letter and having to distinguish between T and J and I;  O and Q; R and P and B; etc.

It was a hit, so I think I might try to come up with a more permanent game that doesn't require me to keep buying more stickers and re-drawing the letters.  I am thinking about rigging something up with magnetic letters and an old cookie-sheet.  Also I would like him to start recognizing the lower-case letters since most of the text we read is in mostly lowercase- so when I start paining my cookie-sheet I think I will be paining those instead of the caps.