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My youngest child is now 9 and in 4th grade so the days of preschool and kindergarten projects are (sadly) behind me.  My very favorite kindergarten project, though, was the full set of large uppercase and lowercase collage letters that both of my boys completed during each of their respective kindergarten years. My boys both adored this project and were so proud of their large, decorated letters. I love this project so much that both sets of letters are still proudly displayed in our school room as a border at the top of the walls.
I purchased my “Awesome Alphabet Collage Boards” from Oriental Trading Company, but a set of uppercase collage letters are also available from Discount School Supply. Once the collage letters are purchased, the real fun begins!
The possibilities for decorating the letters are endless. One of the best places to get great ideas is at a local arts and crafts store. Spend some time in the “kid’s crafts” area. I am continually amazed at the multitude of sticky-backed foam shapes. Sticky-backed foam shapes can be found in scads of shapes – from foam apples to foam zebras! When my children were younger, they enjoyed working with foam stickers tremendously!
Another resource that I found particularly helpful was my Printmaster program (I have the Platinum 15 program). I would sit down with my young son and brainstorm ideas for things that began with our current collage letter. Then I would search the images on Printmaster to find appropriate images to print out for the collage letter. I was also able to print out lots of great images for the collage letters that my boys could color from DLTK-TEACH.
To get your creative thoughts flowing, here is a detailed list of how my boys decorated each letter.
- A – apple prints (with real apples and paint), color the apple and add a leaf at the top to make an “a” apple, Â foam Noah’s Arks, foam apples
- B – real buttons, blue paint, foam bats, real band-aids (a box of band-aids with the child’s favorite cartoon character is particularly fun)
- C – real crayons, pictures of candy, foam candy corn
- D – pictures of dinosaurs, foam dolphins
- E – foam elephants, pictures of eyeballs
- F – foam fish, feathers
- G – glitter, foam grapes, foam giraffes
- H – foam hearts, pictures of hot peppers and hot dogs, foam hippos
- I – pictures of ice, instruments, ice cream, and insects
- J – plastic jewels, foam jack-o-lanterns
- K – real keys, pictures of karate, kittens and kiwis, foam kangaroos
- L – foam leaves and lions
- M – pictures of mushrooms, maps, matches, milk; foam monkeys; marble painting directly on the collage letter
- N – dry pasta noodles dyed various colors, pictures of musical notes, foam Noahs
- O – pictures of Oscar the Grouch and onions, foam octopus and oranges
- P – purple paint, foam Puffer fish and penguins, pictures of peas
- Q – pictures of quarters and question marks
- R – paint the collage letter like a rainbow, foam rabbits and rhinos, pictures of radishes
- S – pictures of the sun, sandwiches, strawberries, and signs; foam splotches
- T – foam trains and triangles, pictures of teeth and tomatoes
- U – various pictures placed UPSIDE DOWN on the collage letters, pictures of umbrellas
- V – pictures of vegetables, venus fly traps, and videos
- W – foam watermelon slices, foam snowflakes for winter, pictures of watches and worms
- X – pictures of xyllophones, paint the collage letter black and add foam white bones for an x-ray
- Y – yellow paint, pictures of yogurt
- Z – pictures of zippers and zucchini, foam zebras, paint the collage letter like a zebra.
I’m sure all of you creative moms out there have lots of other great ideas for decorating collage letters with little ones. Please comment and share your wonderful ideas!
Samantha writes about homeschooling and family life at To Be Busy at Home.
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I loved doing these letters with my last two and can’t wait to do them again with my youngest. I have to wait a year or two for him to fully appreciate them. After hanging them on our wall for the year, we put them in plastic page protectors as keep sakes. They still get out their alphabet books and talk about the process it took to decorate them and “remember this…” “remember that…”.
It looks like you had just as much fun as we had and thank you so much for sharing this great ideas with other moms. It’s a great activity!
Thank you for sharing this. I have a three year old daughter who has a very short attention span.. I have been trying to teach her the alphabet for almost a year now, but she is still having problems with some of the letters. I am also teaching her how to write and so far, she only knows the letter A and V, that is, to write her name AVA. Maybe this could do just the trick.