Does your KneeBouncer love our letter learning games — especially Flowery? Then they’ll bounce for joy with this fun letter swatting game created by Jamie at Hands On As We Grow. A great way to strengthen letter identification skills and reinforce your preschooler’s knowledge. All while playing with purpose.
See how Jamie and her kids are playing with letters…
Find the Letter & Swat It! Active Way for Learning Letters!
I’ve been working a lot on letters with George lately. He’s getting them down pretty good, I’m just reinforcing what he already knows and building his confidence that he does know what the letters are!
This activity was inspired from an iPad app for young kids called KneeBouncers. It has all different areas of learning, but we focused on learning letters. You choose whatever letter to work on and there’s several games to play for each letter, all the same, just with different letters (great repetition for young kids).
The Flowery letter game on KneeBouncers is about picking the flower that has the letter ‘whatever’ it is that they’re working on. I set up this find the letter and swat it game that kind of reminded me of doing the same, as a way to bring the same concept of what he’s learning and playing on the iPad into a hands on learning activity.
I drew a bunch of circles on a piece of butcher paper (affiliate link) that I taped to the table. I just traced around an old cottage cheese container with Sharpie markers.
I purposely used several different colors to add helpful hints in the game later on, but it created another aspect of the game I wasn’t expecting.
In each circle, I wrote a random letter. I didn’t have enough room for 26 circles, so I just chose the letters that I knew George was already familiar with (helping him gain that confidence).
Find the letter and swat it! That’s what!George came to the table when I grabbed two fly swatters, wondering what we were going to do for our letter activity!
I called out a letter, George would then find the letter and swat it!
Sometimes if he was having a hard time finding it, I’d act like I beat him to it and say, “There it is!” and swat it myself.
He thought it was super silly.
Sometimes I’d have him swat a letter and tell me what it was and then I’d swat it myself too.
I’d also give him helpful hints with the color of the letter.
Which turned it into another game.
If I told him it was a blue letter, he sometimes found another blue letter that wasn’t the one we were looking for.
So instead of telling him a letter to swat, I told him to tell me all the blue letters and swat them as he goes.
Then George had enough and wanted to clean up our activity (he likes peeling off tape) and asked to play KneeBouncers again.
