alphabet letter lids

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.

Our uppercase and lowercase letter lids

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!