hide-and-seek: abc style

Today was my first day back to reality after our incredible trip to Disney, our escape from two more feet of snow, and a fantastic conference (which I'll share about on Friday).

So, I wanted to take it easy this afternoon, but I also wanted to make sure that Owen and Cora remembered that there was indeed an alphabet, with uppercase and lowercase letters, and that those letters belonged in a special order.

They were rammy. I was tired. So after lunch, I tried to channel some of their energy into a Hide-and-Seek ABC Game, and (yeeesss!!) the stars were aligned.

They bought it big-time, and after dinner, they begged for more. (I'm not even kidding.)

• Hide-and-Seek ABC's: I pulled out our bag of alphabet letters which is from reading a-z, but if you need uppercase and lowercase alphabet cards, they are here to download.
  

I said to Owen and Cora, Okay friends. Who's up for a game of hide-and-seek?

They both were. Really, find me a kid who's not up for this game at any time of the day.

I said, Awesome. Head up to Owen's room. We're playing hide-and-seek before rest time, but we're not hiding. These silly alphabet letters are going to do the hiding, and you're going to find them.

Can you see that sneaky letter 'F'?

So I told them to hide out in Cora's room while the uppercase letters found hiding spots, and I tucked them into pretty easy spots around Owen's room.

When they returned, like people possessed, they searched for the letters. And my only instructions were that when they found a letter, they had to call out its name. I told them I wanted to hear letters being shouted as loud as they could.

When they found the letters, they dropped them in front of me.

And when they couldn't find any more, I said, Okay, now let's put them in order to make sure we found them all. Someone find the first letter of the alphabet and put it here.

Owen led the task of putting them in order, but I made sure to hand Cora cards so that she was involved, too.

When all of the letters were in order, we sang the Alphabet Song to check their work.

I said, Awesome job. Now head back into Cora's room so that the lowercase letters can find hiding spots, and before I finished the sentence, they were outta there.


I hid the lowercase letters, just like I did with the uppercase letters, and when they found them they called them out. Cora had more difficulty with this, but she got lucky enough to find 'c' and 'o' and 'z', which she confidently screamed upon finding them.

After all of the letters were found, we played match-up and put the lowercase letter on top of its uppercase partner. I originally suggested turning the cards over when we matched them, but Owen said he wanted to 'see all of the letters'. Fine with me!

Our downstairs hide-and-seek ABC's. . . a little messier,
so finding letters got pretty tricky.

After we sang the Alphabet Song to check their work (really, the letters were in order, but you can't sing this song too often!), I collected the cards. Both Owen and Cora insisted that we play again, but I promised that we'd play after dinner. It was late, and I knew Cora needed to rest.

So we played again with Maddy after dinner, and the intensity of the game tripled.

They ran faster, they screamed louder (gah!), but they also laughed harder.

And Maddy and Owen begged to each hide half of the lowercase letters, which they did, which resulted in endless searches for letters that they just hid but couldn't find five minutes later. Thankfully, we ended up finding all of the letters in the end.

A game like this is good for any aged little one, from Cora (2 years) to Maddy (who just turned 6).

Here's why:

• they get to practice putting the letters in alphabetical order;

• they have more practice recognizing letters that give them difficulty (b/d; p/q; etc);

• it still helps to see uppercase and lowercase letters matched;

• confidence grows when kiddos see a letter they know and they can YELL it out;

• alphabet games can only help because knowing the letters of the alphabet is one of the basic building blocks of literacy.
  

fyi: If you want some other alphabet cards, here's a previous post where I linked back to some other types of alphabet cards.

Happy letter hunting!