Alphabet Puzzle Sensory Play

When my daughter was around 2 years old, we got her this wooden alphabet puzzle. She was beginning to show an interest in letters so I set up this fun sensory play activity so we could explore the alphabet further, following her interests.

For this activity I used colored rice from a previous activity to fill up one of the sensory bins in our flisat table, hid the puzzle pieces in it and set the base on the other closed side of the table. 

The sensory aspect of this activity made the puzzle more exciting. At age 2, this puzzle was still a bit challenging for her. Because the letters are lowercase, the u, n, p, d etc can get confusing when the pieces look the same. 

Once she was done with the puzzle, I gave her a few bowls, scoops and a brush and she kept on pouring, transferring and hiding the letters. She loved the noise the rice made when dropped on the letters. This activity kept her engaged for close to an hour and she went back to it throughout the day.

Montessori and the Alphabet 

In Montessori education children learn lowercase letters first, as these are more commonly seen. I chose a lower case alphabet puzzle precisely for this reason. 

Children are also taught the phonetic letter sounds first. This means that instead of reading the letter B (“bee”), we sound out the letter (“buh”) (keeping the “uh” part short). This helps children to write later on as it becomes easier to form words when they know the sound – CAT for example – rather than the letter names (See-Ay-Tee). In Montessori children actually learn to write before they read. 

Learning to read and write is a natural and gradual process that begins unconsciously and much of the toddler work -improving pincer grasp such as transfer, scooping, pouring, holding knobbed puzzle pieces, or doing process art – are actually building the skills to hold a pencil and write later on. Did you know that Practical Life activities are also an important preparation for literacy?

At this stage, my goal was not for her to learn the alphabet but rather to expose her to the visual, tactile and sound properties of the letters and start to build a foundation for when we introduced the alphabet later with actual sandpaper letters and the three-period lesson.

Cleaning up is part of the learning process, so make sure to encourage your child to tidy up after they finish playing. Model how to do it until your child feels confident enough to initiate the tidying up process independently.

Bringing play to life:

• How about showing your child that letters are all around? Where can they spot them?
• You can choose one letter of the alphabet puzzle to try to match with similar letters found elsewhere throughout the home. Let your child carry the letter with them to see if they can find a match!