Magic Appearing Letters {101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet}

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For kids, learning the alphabet has the potential to be quite boring. But I don’t like boring. I like magical! So I used this activity to bring a bit of magic to my daughter’s letter learning lessons.

The next installment in my 101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet Series is an activity I call Magic Appearing Letters. This activity makes use of a crayon resist technique that makes letters appear “like magic” when kids apply water color paints to the paper.

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

Here are the materials I used for this activity:

Liquid watercolors (We own Colorations Liquid Watercolor Paints from Discount School Supply, and we use them all time in so many different ways. But you can also purchase quality liquid watercolors from Amazon.
A small cup for holding the liquid watercolors
A plastic pipette for dripping paint onto the paper (we own these pipettes but I also love the one in this set)
Two cups labeled T and t
Several small squares of paper on which I used a white crayon to write either an uppercase T or a lowercase t.
A small tray to hold the materials and contain the mess
Paper towels to blot the extra ink (not pictured)

On this particular day, I had XGirl focus on the difference between the capital T and the lowercase t. But you can easily adapt this activity to have kids sort letters by any other characteristic: b vs. d, p vs. q, letters with straight lines vs. letters with curvy lines, real letters vs. made up letters, vowels vs. consonants, capitals vs. lowercase, etc.

I set up the activity by sitting XGirl at a table with the materials. I poured some liquid watercolor into a cup for her, and showed her how to use the pipette to cover her paper with color. (Yay for slipping some fine motor practice in there!)

After she blotted the ink from her paper, she noticed that a letter had magically appeared! She correctly identified it as a lowercase t.

She sorted all of her magically appearing letters into the correctly labeled cup.

She absolutely loved this activity. And I loved watching her joy as each letter appeared and she was able to identify what it was. Isn’t it great when learning is so much fun?!?

Have questions about teaching the alphabet? We’ve got answers! Click here to learn more.