Swat the Fly gross motor alphabet activity {101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet}

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If you have an active kid who loves any excuse to “hit” things, you will love the next installment of my 101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet Series. This week I’m sharing an activity called Swat the Fly, which gives kids an excuse to “swat flies” while learning their letters. (See the bottom of this post for a link to a free printable for playing this game.)

With this activity, kids can move and be active while learning the alphabet. Adding a gross motor component to an activity can be helpful for boosting engagement and learning.

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

To play Swat the Fly, I cut out several letters from my Swat the Fly printable and taped them to the wall with painter’s tape. (Be careful what you use to adhere them to the wall to ensure it won’t remove the paint.)

On this particular occasion, the majority of the letters I taped to the wall were ones that XGirl was having a bit of difficulty with, like confusing v and w (why is ‘w’ called double-u instead of double-v?).

Unless your child is quite advanced, I highly recommend playing with just a handful of letters rather than all 26 letters of the alphabet.

When XGirl came downstairs, she immediately noticed all the “flies” on the wall. So I handed her a fly swatter and invited her to help me swat them.

We played a game in which I named a letter, she found the letter on the wall, and then she swatted the fly with the fly swatter. You could also play this game by saying a letter sound, like /s/ or /b/ and having your child find the letter that matches the sound.

XGirl had a great time playing this game. As we played, I observed her get better and better at distinguishing between some of the letters she had been mixing up, like ‘b’ and ‘d.’