Kids Alphabet Water Activity

Let you child have fun playing with water while learning their alphabet. A great sensory play activity that encourages learning through play.

Water play is an absolute firm favourite with young children. It's a great go to if you need an activity quickly. One thing about water play is that you are not confined to playing with it outside. There are lots of water play opportunities you can have inside including in a plastic storage box, in the sink or the bath. I've always found that you need to start of conservatively with water play until children are old enough to learn the rules of indoor water play. No matter how old your children are though, they will always get wetter than you anticipate so its always wise to have a towel and spare clothes to hand. 

I've mentioned before that when it comes to learning the alphabet all children will learn in their own time. I've been doing a lot a alphabet activities with my four year old and it really is all about exposure, giving her lots of learning opportunities through play. 

When doing alphabet activities with her, I actually teach her the letter sound rather than the alphabet. The reason for this is because when children start school they are taught phonics and I don't want this to confuse her. Don't worry of your child knows the alphabet and not phonics, you could perhaps start by introducing the concept to them. When talking about the alphabet you can say the letter a, it sounds like 'a' for apple. 

If you are new to the world of phonics then check out this handy guide from The School Run.

Kids Alphabet Water Activity

I'm always looking for new ways to make the alphabet/phonics fun and I find the best way is to incorporate it into different sensory play activities. This water activity is really easy to set up and you can use what you all ready have.

For this, I chose to write the alphabet into bottle lids using a whiteboard marker. We do have a lot of alphabet resources in our house but not many that I wanted to get wet just in case it ruined them. Bottle lids are a great resource to collect as I find they come in handy for many uses and they are the perfect resource that can withstand water. 

I filled a plastic storage box with some water and then added the letter bottle lids. I chose to do this activity on our tuff spot tray as it's a great base for containing any spillages.  I then added some tweezers and our Learning Resources Handy Scooper. 

There is no right or wrong way to do this activity:

You can ask your child to pick out a particular letter/sound with the tweezers or scooper.

You can let them pick out a bottle top and then ask them if they know what letter/sound it is.

Or you can just let them explore and encourage learning by telling them what letter they've found.

My four year old really loved this activity, she enjoyed the learning aspect but also just playing with water and letting her play the way she wanted to. 

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For more alphabet activities you may like:

Alphabet Construction 

Kids Alphabet Hunt