Here’s a collection of hands-on letter D activities for 2-year-olds!
We’ve been doing a lot of alphabet activities with my Two over the past few months. In fact, the other day she came up to me and said,
“Mommy, I had a dweam about M’s and A’s!”
Since she hears her older siblings talk about dreams, I suspect this statement was an attempt to fit in rather than statement of fact. 😉
But either way, I love that she’s thinking about letters all the time!
Letter D Activities for 2-year-olds
I started by printing out the colorful letter D’s you can get in the printable at the end of this post. Then I pulled out some glass gems (a fun manipulative!) and asked her to put them on different D’s.
“Can you put a gem on a yellow D?”
“How about a red D?”
“Put a gem on a polka-dotted D.”
This helped her get used to seeing the letter D, and it also reinforced her knowledge of colors, which is something we’ve been working on.
I’m always looking for new ways to use the photo cards that come with the letter cards you saw in the first picture. This time I printed a double set, and we played a matching game. I only put out six cards at a time and asked her to find the matches.
She loved this. (Get the pictures in the download at the end of this post.)
While this didn’t directly teach the letter D, painting with Duplos was a fun sensory activity.
We also followed the simple tutorial at No Time for Flashcards and made a drum out of an oatmeal canister.
I also printed one of our block letters and gave her some dice. She put the dice around the letter D. As she worked, I reinforced the sound. “Dice…/d/, /d/, dice.”
I printed this fun freebie from Glued to My Crafts, and we practiced doing basic counting. She rolled the die, I helped her count the dots, and we counted that many gems to use as “sprinkles” on the donut.
At this point (2 years 10 months) she is able to count objects up to 3. Beyond that, she gets confused. My point with this activity was to help her learn one-to-one correspondence: you say one number for each object that you point to.
She’s not there yet, but baby steps will get us there!
I just created this giant set of alphabet mazes for uppercase letters. They’re perfect for her! (You can get them for free by joining our email list here.)
We did a lot of alphabet review activities this week, like this one. I buried some wooden letters in a bin of colored rice. Then she dug the up and matched them to their cards. This is such a versatile toy from Plan Toys!
We spent some time watching the letters and sounds DVD from Heidisongs. She just watched for the first few letters, but after a little while she was trying to copy the actions.
Grab our letter cards and letter D pictures in the download at the bottom of this post.
Check out the rest of the series!
Sheryl
Just an fyi-Letter D crdsPh is labeled as L crdsPh. Thank you so much for all the wonderful resources. I had taught preschool for over 30 years and wish this were available when I first started, I would have saved thousands on teaching books. It is most gracious of you to have it available for free. Even though I am not currently teaching, I can’t keep myself from accumulating resources, just in case I return to the field. God Bless
Anna Geiger
Oops! You can change the name when you save it to your computer. Sorry about the mixup!
I know what you mean about spending thousands on teaching books… the blog world kind of bloomed soon after I left classroom teaching. I would have saved lots, too!!
I hope you get the opportunity to return to the classroom, Sheryl!