Sticky Letters Activity

Con-tact paper is love, always and forever.

What’s your familiarity with Con-tact paper? Are you buying each other BFF necklaces at Claire’s next week or are you not in any way sure what I’m talking/typing about? Either way: this activity is for you because everyone needs a sticky letters activity in their lives.

Curious how I introduce the alphabet to my kids? Check out Playing Preschool: 190 days of at-home learning.

But what is Con-tact paper?

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Con-tact paper is way cool for activities. Even though I’m a firm believer in “use what you own” Con-tact paper is my rare exception to having what I would deem a “specialty item”.

Think of it like that random bottle of spices you bought for that one recipe…

Except Con-tact paper can be used in lots of recipes, I mean, activities so you’ll get a full amount of use out of it.

Con-tact paper is clear plasticy and sticky – it’s used a drawer liners or to cover textbooks OR in toddler activities and kids activities.

At least the supply list is light.

Materials

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• Con-tact paper
• Giant sharpie marker
• Paper letters – I cut mine out of index cards

The set up is simple and fun, but it’ll take some brain power. Here’s the low down:

Con-tact paper comes with a wax-y paper protecting the sticky part. BEFORE YOU PEEL THAT OFF: Flip the Con-tact paper over. On the actual Con-tact paper is where you are going to write the alphabet.

But here’s the trick for sticky letters.

You need to print your letters BACKWARDS. It’s a fun little brain exercise for us parents and is almost as tricky as writing with the opposite hand (fun fact: I am SUPER left handed).

Once you pull off the protective sheet, carefully tape the Con-tact paper to the wall sticky side out.

I promise this is a lot easier than it sounds, but also sometimes can be tricky. But always worth it. But promise. No more buts.

Making this an ABC matching game

I really, really wanted to work with my daughter on matching up upper and lower case letters. Part of the fun in learning the alphabet is learning that each letter has a capital form and a lower case form.

Some of them are easy letters (like Ss and Cc) and some are tricky letters (like Ee and Bb).

I wrote lower case letters on my Con-tact paper and printed upper case letters on some index cards. But you can do what’s best for your child and do all upper or all lower case or even a mix of both. I cut those out to make little alphabet paper squares.

I wanted to use magnetic letters for this activity, but they weren’t playing nicely with my Con-tact paper so we went with homemade, cut out, not fancy at all, DIY letters.

Here’s what else we did with this activity

Once my 3-year-old had finished putting all the paper letters onto the Con-tact paper, we sat and played “Find the Letter” and “quizzed” each other. It was a riot!

The letters pulled off the paper easily so it was no big deal to play the whole matching game again.

Sticky letters is an awesome activity – just like Con-tact paper always is. It may not be the most conventional toddler activity supply but it’s one that I’m so happy we have. Especially because activities like this are always more fun on Con-tact paper.

When will you make your sticky letters activity?