I still keep lids.
Actually, I keep lids, egg cartons, coffee containers, yogurt cups and probably too many other things that are cool to play with and easy to reinvent.
The lids were great for working on colors with Cora, and they’re still fun for Maddy and Owen to play with every now and again, whether we use that all-too important math vocabulary or not.
But being that we’ve accumulated about a gazillion lids and being that we had a bunch of alphabet letter stickers, I thought I’d combine the two and make some alphabet letter lid manipulatives.
Alphabet Letter Lids: We started out by dumping our huge container of lids on the floor, organizing them into color piles and then–just for fun–putting them in piles of tens in order to count how many we had collected.
Even Cora could help with the counting. One hundred lids exactly! Talk about a great way of counting by 10’s and then actually seeing what 100 looks like. It was a pretty sweet math moment for us.
I then put uppercase letter stickers on the inside of medium-sized lids (from gallons of milk and such) and lowercase letter stickers on the smaller ones (from water bottles).
And when I was finished, I said, Okay, my friends. I need some major help in making sure that I have all of the letters here.
Would you please put the letters in alphabetical order, with the uppercase letters on the top row and the lowercase letters below them?
See how I’ve matched the letter A’s? Let’s try to match the whole alphabet, just to make sure we have a lid for each letter.
So we matched and matched and matched some more, until we had the whole alphabet–uppercase and lowercase–matched up. And we sang the good ole ABC Song just to double-check our work.
And after we matched, I made some extra vowels and consonants I thought we’d use with more frequency–m, n, t, s, p, d, g, b. We built our names, played with some words, but by this time we had been playing with alphabet letter lids for quite some time and the kiddos were ready for something new.
I was just happy to have the kids engaged and eager to create words and play with the letters for a bit, and I’m sure we’ll pull these out when we want to play with letters next time.
Very easy, super-inexpensive, and just one more way of sneaking in a little bit of learning while playing with colors, doing some counting, and chatting about the letters of the alphabet. Woo-hoo!
Want a few more alphabet activities? Check out:
- backyard alphabet hunt
- homemade alphabet book
- leafy letter learning
- ABC hunt
- on the road ABC hunt
- lowercase ABC hunt
- build your own bingo: uppercase and lowercase match
- ABC cards and clothespin match
- alphabet letter splash
- alphabingo (play with lowercase letters)
- alphabet letter lids
- leafy outdoor alphabet hunt
- build your own board game
- clothespin letter match
- 10 fun ways to learn the alphabet
And don’t miss our #raiseareader series on YouTube!
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Great Activity. I am going to start saving my lids!
So many game options from some old lids. Who would have thought! This a great blog post.
Another great idea!
Great idea – I have done numbers like this, I am stocking piling bottle tops to make upper & lower case letters for my toddler. Right now I am saving large lids to make a sensory box for my baby. It takes time to get a bunch of lids doesn't it!? Great job! 🙂
Hi Amy, I tagged you in a post…
http://littleilluminations.blogspot.com/2010/03/honest-scrap.html
Thanks for all you share!
I used to do a similar activity when I taught kindergarten…except that I had the lower-case on one side of the lid and the capital on the other side & we had a double-sided cap-match mat that they could match upper to upper, lower to lower or upper to lower 🙂
When I was teaching I had this huge storage closet. One side was full of recycled stuff: butter and yogurt containers, all sorts of lids, pringle/coffee/oatmeal containers, empty spice containers, applesauce containers, and much more. Unfortunately, when I quit I left it all there. This is one of those times I wish I had my collection. Wes would love this activity. Thanks for sharing!
I am totally saving lids now! So many different uses, and this one so much fun!
This is a great idea! I've got the lids, but can't find the upper/lowercase letter stickers. Anyone have a suggestion on where I can find them? Many thanks!
I think I found the stickers at my local craft store a while back. With the weekly 20% coupon, you can get them rather inexpensively.
Very nice idea! I love the idea of using things we would normally throw away to make a fabulous learning game! I will definitely use this idea in my kindergarten classroom.
I never even considered doing this before, but it's a GREAT idea! I'll definitely have to start saving my lids.
Thank you for the sharing!
Love this! We just made some with glass stones and scrapbook letters but of course I love the colors in yours! : )