Fun ways to learn the Alphabet: Learn E with a busy bee!

I hope you all are enjoying reading (and implementing!) the Letter-of-the-week activities. Be sure to click on the previous letters, if you missed out on reading those. Letter A, Letter B, Letter C, Letter D

This week we are focusing on some super easy peasy hands-on ways of learning letter E, but with a twist 🙂 Instead of presenting activities in a tray, I have created some fun busy bags. 

Busy Bags are a great way to engage children in a fun way. You can pretty much add any interesting activities / toys in a busy bag. These can be used during quiet time, travel, at restaurants etc. You can use plastic pouches / zip locks for the bags. 

Simply put, Busy Bags are an awesome way to keep little toddlers and preschoolers engaged. You can make these super quickly and ahead of time with whatever supplies you have at home. You can get them out when required, and these have been a real life saver for us at times 😉  

Here are some supplies that can come handy while making busy bags. Obviously this is not an exclusive list. You can use your own creative ideas and add more fun elements! You can easily get these at stationary shops / craft stores / online:

• Pom poms
• Craft sticks
• Foam / felt paper
• Clothespins / pegs 
• Pipe cleaners
• Wooden / foam blocks
• Magnetic letters / numbers
• Decorative magnets (large sized. Make sure none of this is a choking hazard).
• Large buttons 
• Shells
• Legos 
• Foam / felt shapes 
• Stickers
• Wooden embellishments 

And now moving onto our letter E busy bags: 

First busy bag had upper case & lowercase letter E cutout – my son enjoyed tracing using these. 

In the second busy bag, I included a paper on which I traced uppercase letter E. I added some elephant stickers and my son had fun time putting the stickers on the letter E. This is a great way to practice sounds, where we spoke how the word “elephant” starts with letter sound “eeh”. 

E is for exercise, so for third busy bag I created fun exercise command cards. This is a great way to do some fun gross motor activities either at indoors or outdoor!

For busy bag #4, I included an egg shaped dot marker printable. I also gave my son some pom poms to fill in the circles. He glued them on, and it looked like a very pretty crafty egg 🙂

One more fun “eggy activity” lined up was to very briefly study about egg-laying animals (oviparous animals).

I created a template of the oviparous animals. I kept their matching counterparts in easter eggs! So we opened up each egg, talked about the animal and matched it to the main template. 

For busy bag no. #6, we very informally spoke about the 3D geometric shape of an egg – Ovoid. I have the 3D Geometric solids that my son finds super interesting. I got these from kidoenterprsises.com 

Keeping up with the “E for Egg” theme, I created super fun egg sequencing cards– right from cracking the egg to making a half fry  I am a vegetarian, but sonny boy loves eggs, so he surely enjoyed this activity. I also added some toy figurines to make the activity more fun and hands-on. And I put this activity in a box instead of a bag 😉

Busy bag no #8 was elephant themed. For this, I included a small board book on elephant, along with an elephant picture card and figurine.  

Last activity was a busy box – an egg themed sensory box! I also included a fun poem on egg that I found from the internet.  

Inside the sensory box were different types of eggs, figurines of oviparous animals and some colorful shredded paper. I also included some spoons and spatulas for transferring work!

I hope you got some ideas from this post. These kind of busy bags / busy boxes surely come to rescue when the toddler is getting impatient, bored or grumpy! 

All these activities for letter E busy bags can be seen here on my YouTube channel:

Talking about busy bags, I also have a video on Travel busy bags in case you need some more ideas (for inspiration!): 

Here’s the link to another fun video on phonics busy bags, in case your child is currently interested in learning letter sounds:

All printables referred to in this article can be downloaded from my blog, the link to which you will find in these videos.

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