Fun ways to learn the Alphabet: Say ‘C’ with glee!

Hope your little one had a good time learning A and knowing B, let’s get started with some hands-on activities for introducing letter C to your child.

The idea behind introducing one letter a week is to help your child enjoy the activities at their pace, one step at a time, without rushing it! 
 

1. Letter Tracing: Along with tracing the sandpaper letter, we also used some flat marbles to fill in the dot printable. This is a great fine motor activity and also allows the child to know better about letter formation.  

I got the flat marbles from a local stationary shop. You can get this even at supermarkets or aquarium shops!

C is for cars and so I included this fun race track activity for my son with some of his toy cars. I simply used a black cardstock paper and drew the Cs with a chalk! 

We also created letter C using play dough! My son adorned it with some flat marbles. I love how these creative little minds can think! 

2. Letter C poster: In this poster, I have included objects starting from letter sound “cuh” – you can download all the printables from my blog, the link to which will be in the embedded video. 

We also did a caterpillar craft as you can see. For this, my son glued some pom poms to create a cute caterpillar! 

3. Letter of the week folder: The folder contains picture cards of all objects starting from letter “c’.

4. Learning the sound right: We also went through a basket with all the objects starting with letter sound ‘cuh’ – Such activities help the child to associate objects with their beginning letter sounds.  So in the basket here, we have a car, cap, cage, carrot, cup, corn and a construction vehicle – you can pretty much put whatever you have at home! 

 5. Nuggets of knowledge: C is for cow. So I included this quick work where we discussed which products are obtained from cow’s milk. I included some of his toy figurines and some empty containers from my kitchen to make this activity more interesting and hands-on.  

6. Matching activity: C is also for cartoons, and we used this opportunity to play a quick match-up game of some of the famous cartoon characters!

7. C is for colouring: so we used two mediums to paint – Cotton and Cauliflower – again both starting with letter C! 

We pinched a cotton into a wooden clothespin and made that into our painting brush. My son enjoyed dabbing different colors using this cotton peg! 

Next we painted some cauliflower with green and blue colour. 

Arts activities like these help to break the monotony of just using paper and paints. Children love to experiment, explore and try something new every time! So such simple activities are perfect (and easy to set up, too!). 

Another fun coloring work we did is drew some black spots on the cow template. I had a template of cow without any spots, and so my son had so much fun filing in the black spots and making the cow look like one 🙂

 Again remember that children’s artwork need not be perfect. It is completely OK if they want to paint outside the lines or if they want to paint the sun blue in colour. It is best to let their imagination run its course, rather than we prompting or redirecting them! 

Since we love cars and coloring, I set this work for my son where he had to color the wheels of the cars and drive them on the bubble paper! It was fun watching the color from the tyres pass onto the bubble sheet! 

8. Puzzle time! I created this quick numerical car puzzle. Here the child has the sequence the puzzle pieces in the right order. You can download this puzzle printable from the blog link referred to in the embedded video.

9. Pretend play! I set two fun pretend play stations for my son: (both starting with letter C – Car wash station and a cake shop!). 

Firstly I set this Car repair + wash station for my son – this was super easy to set up – Just few of his toy cars, some play tools, a bowl full of water, some soap and sponge! This kept my son busy for 30 minutes, so this activity was a complete winner 🙂

And after that I set a cake & cupcake shop with some of the toy figurines. We also used clay and actual cupcake holder to create some toy cupcakes. 

Quick note on pretend play / dramatic play: 

1. Young children learn by exploring & imagining. Dramatic plays give them the opportunity to experiment and think outside the box! 

2. Pretend play is also a great language builder – children can talk amongst themselves or with their parents / teachers or to oneself about so many things during the play. E.g. While playing a shopkeeper, they can talk to you about their product, its price etc! 

3. When played in a group, it teaches the child in a fun way about social skills – they learn about turn taking, they learn to work in a group and they learn to communicate with each other! 

I hope this article gave you some ideas not just about teaching a particular letter, but also on how to creatively keep a child engaged while indoors! You do not need buy expensive toys to keep a child happily engaged at home – you can make do with things from around the house! Very often we also like to take our activities outdoors – especially books or arts activities! 

Early learning should be simple, fun and child led. So always make sure that let your child lead you on. Follow his cues and his interests. And tweak the activities accordingly. Also these activities are something that we do for about 30 minutes or so in a day.  Rest of the day goes in practical life works (helping me around the house, watering plants, etc), quiet time, outdoorsy time and the likes. What I am trying to tell you is that we do not follow any structure. This isn’t a school routine. It is something to help my child harness his interest for language and learning new things. We keep things pretty flexible in our home. And I urge you to do the same 🙂

For now, here is my letter C video for a closer look at the activities:

Enjoy learning C with your child! Stay tuned for fun, creative, hands-on activities on ‘D’ next week!

Also read: Activities for A, Activities for B, Activities for D

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