Literacy & ABCsPreschoolers7 Comments
I want to take a moment to introduce to you Sarah of How Wee Learn. Sarah is going to start contributing her brilliant activities here once a month. She has great ideas that I think you’ll love, including this cool activities to learn the alphabet with paper chains. Plus, you’ll learn how to make a paper chain reusable!
When my little guy finds something he loves, he tends to stick with it for a long while.
A really long while. A since-Christmas-and-now-it-is-August long while.
Sam, who is 4, has been really enjoying making paper chains. We started making paper chains at Christmas time to decorate our Christmas tree. And in the 8 months since, we have made more paper link chains then I have ever made in my entire time on this Earth. But I am not complaining – really I’m not.
Making paper chains is full of learning!
Most recently, we have made some reusable paper chains to learn the alphabet.
Sam likes to play with letters of the alphabet, so I try to pop them into different activities whenever I can.
And since Sam’s love of making paper chains is going no where any time soon, I thought it time to make some reusable paper chain links.
I thought of this idea months ago, but assumed Sam would move past his paper chain making fascination any day — not so. Though now that we have reusable paper chain links he will likely move past his fascination tomorrow.
How to learn the alphabet with a paper chain and make it reusable:
To make these reusable alphabet paper chains I simply cut thin strips of construction paper and placed Velcro on the ends.
I placed one piece of the Velcro on one end of the paper, and the other on the opposite end and opposite side of the paper. It’s kind of tricky to put into words, but should make sense as soon as you round the paper strip into a circle. Of course, the Velcro is completely unnecessary to make regular paper chain.
We have made thousands of paper chains with tape. The Velcro just makes it reusable – and an independent activity for my little guy too.
I made 26 strips and wrote one letter of the alphabet on each strip.
I wrote the capital letters on one side, and the matching lowercase letters on the other side.
We have not really done many activities with lowercase letters yet. I decided to add them on to this activity as a way to introduce them a little to Sam, or at least expose him to them.
I also like Sam to use lowercase letters while making names, and these strips are great for making names!
I gave Sam the challenge to create the whole alphabet, in order, using his paper link chains. He loves a challenge.
He got right to it and soon recognized a pattern. I used green and blue paper to make the alphabet paper chain, and alternated them blue, green, blue. This way, if he was stuck on a letter he could at least recognize which color it should be, limiting his choices to help him find the right one.
Sam made it to about letter “P” before slowing down.
Once he hit the letter “R” he declared it “Time to go CRAZY!!”.
Apparently this meant to put whichever letter on the chain, in whichever order he liked. And boy did he have a blast doing it!
I love when he gets excited about an activity – even when it is not at all what I had planned.
And he was still learning so much. He was recognizing and naming letters, and practicing fine motor skills too.
When he had finished his chain, he asked to keep it in his bedroom so he could use it during his quiet time.
This activity makes a great quiet time activity – even while little ones ‘go CRAZY’ with it. It would also make a great activity for the car.
A fun way to learn the alphabet, practice matching letters, building names and words, fine motor skills, patterning, and it’s quiet? Awesome.
I’d love to hear how you have used paper chains in regular play or activities, other than to countdown for Christmas!
You can simply just comment below to let me know.
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Joanne Shackleford says
Love this! Why have I never thought of abc paper chains!?!? Thanks!
Brocho says
I really liked your paper chain idea. To make the chain more permanent and more sturdy, you should laminate them. Draw the shape of a chain using a template on 2,3 oak tags. Have them laminated. Now you can cut out as many as you would like to start with. Write the letters with permanent markers and add self-stick Velcro. When you want to add more letters and colors, just cut out more.
Keep in mind, try using lighter color oak tags so the letters can be clearly seen.