Cutting & pasting letters from magazines {101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet}

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Do you have a child who loves to cut and paste? A child who gets excited when the glue sticks come out? A child who is working on scissors skills? Do you have old magazines or catalogues laying around?

If you answered yes to any of the above, this may be a wonderful letter learning activity to try with your children.

The next installment in my 101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet Series is cutting and pasting letters from magazines. This activity works on letter recognition while also developing fine motor skills. It’s also very adaptable to kids of different developmental levels.

Click here if you want more information about teaching the alphabet in a fun, hands-on, and multi-sensory way.

A note about adapting this activity for your child’s learning needs

When I did this activity with my daughter, she was learning about the vowels. Therefore, I had her search for five different letters, a, e, i, o, and u.

If you are doing this with a younger child or one who is not very familiar with the letters yet, I strongly recommend having them search for just one or two letters at a time. Here are a few ideas for adapting this activity:

Have your child search for the letters he or she is learning that week (if you do letter of the week)
Have your child search just for uppercase versions of 1 or 2 letters
Have your child search just for lowercase versions of 1 or 2 letters
Have your child search for both uppercase and lowercase versions of 1 letter
Have your child search for the letters in his or her name
Have your child search for letters that are confusing him or her, like b and d or p and q
Have your child search for every letter of the alphabet in alphabetical order (for more advanced learners only)

As you can see, this activity can be easily adapted to meet your child’s needs.

For this activity, you will need the following materials:

Old magazines or catalogues (ones that your child can cut up)
Kid-friendly scissors
Glue stick
Paper divided into sections with the letter to be pasted in each written at the top

Start by making sure your child understands what letters he or she is to search for in the magazine, and that he or she knows how to use the scissors to cut out letters. I showed XGirl how to cut out a big chunk of the page with the letter she wanted, and then to trim it down to just the letter. This made the cutting much easier for her.