Today I’m sharing a fun collection of letter F activities for 2-year-olds!
Recently I shared a link to our alphabet activities for 2-year-olds on our Facebook page. A reader wondered why I would advocate doing this type of formal learning activities with toddlers. Don’t we have enough of a push-down curriculum already? Why would we expect 2-year-olds to do formal learning?
A few things.
- This is fun for us. I like teaching my daughter the alphabet. She loves doing learning activities with me. In fact, she asks for them nearly every day (and many days I have to say no because we don’t have time!)
- We do these in short bursts. Usually we do activities for 10-20 minutes at a time. This includes our art activities, which are certainly not “formal” learning.
- We do hands-on learning. While I use a fair amount of printables, my daughter does not do traditional worksheets.
- The rest of our day is full of free-play and read alouds. I’m confident that our alphabet activities aren’t keeping my daughter from learning through play.
So there you go. 🙂 On to the activities!
Letter F Activities for 2-year–olds
I like to begin with a simple letter recognition printable from Learning the Alphabet. (Love those Do-a-Dot markers!)
We do very few traditional cut and paste crafts because they don’t foster a lot of creativity – but the work of gluing and placing the pieces is a great challenge for my Two. She liked make this frog from Artsy Momma.
Painting on foil was a unique experience!
My daughter is very much into coloring – much more than my Four was at this stage. So I printed the blackline alphabet book from Learning the Alphabet and brought out some markers. She loved coloring every page and naming the pictures.
We do a lot of alphabet review activities. For this one, I cut apart post-it notes. Then my Four wrote letters we’ve learned on the notes and put them in a muffin tray. My Two dropped a penny many times and named the letter in the space it landed.
We sorted our toy food and played farmer’s market.
I printed my fish bubble counting mats, and we counted the bubbles for numbers 1-6. My Two can’t count groups of objects beyond three, but this was a fun activity to do together. Lots of simple practice sessions like this one will get us there.
I printed our large block letter F and then printed it on construction paper. I cut apart the construction paper letter to make a puzzle.
Could she make the letter without the frame? Yes!
These letter F mazes are still a little challenging for her, so I help her see where to go on the maze with her marker. These are free for subscribers. (Sign up here.)
I named the pictures on this page of letter F images. She covered them with a poker chip as I named them. Get this printable for free in the download at the end of this post.
She put mini-fish erasers all along the letter F.
I pulled out some alphabet stamps and invited her to stamp F’s on the giant F.
I used my flash so you could see this image, but we were doing the activity in the dark. I wrote letters we’ve learned on sticky notes and invited my Two to shine a flashlight on letters as I named them. Later, she named the letters herself as she found them. She would have been happy to do this all morning, but I was getting bored. 😉
Finally – we don’t do much letter writing at all yet, but I thought she could attempt letter F in a salt tray since it’s a pretty basic letter. I showed her how to draw the lines with my finger, and she did the same. And then couldn’t resist playing in the tray a bit. 😉
Get your letter F printables at the end of this post!
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For curious, what month is her birthday, if you’re willing to share? I have a little guy who turned two in November and I can’t imagine him doing any of these yet. He’s rather delayed in speech for whatever reason (only says about 5-10 words) so telling me letters, even if he did know them, isn’t even close, but I don’t think he could put dots in the circular lines on the paper either. I know that boys are generally slower in some of these things and I’m honestly not worried about my little guy not making it to college or something :), I’m just wondering if I could expect more from him at his age. 🙂
She’s much older than your little guy, Naomi! She will be 3 at the end of January. If you look at letters A, M, and R… those were the ones we did after she had just turned 2. But we did each letter over several weeks. Now we’re at one letter a week, but we couldn’t do that at first. Definitely all my kids have been different in their interest/willingness to learn the alphabet. For our fourth, I started when he was 3. (see my letter of the week with 3 year old series) But our second daughter had an early interest, so we went with it.
Do they understand what the letters really mean? I thought about starting with the letter of his name – W. But other than being able to identify it, does it really have any meaning?
I would say the letters really didn’t mean much at first. Just like toddlers can count by rote, but the numbers don’t mean anything to them. I don’t feel like that’s a reason not to start, though. The more you do it and talk about letters, the more it starts to come together. A few months into it, she was “writing” by scribbling on paper and telling me what letters she thought she’d written. I definitely think 3 is a good age to start, but for kids who are interested and enjoy it, 2 can also work well. In my experience with my own kids, it all starts to come together more quickly at about 2 years 8 months. So that can be a good time to start, too.
That makes sense – thanks for the thoughts. It does really make a big difference on each child – that’s so important to remember. And how they grow up and the activities they are a part of, whether with parents or older siblings. While my little guy has a hard time talking, he’s oddly good at using hand woodworking tools, but that’s because my husband has a workshop set up downstairs and it’s fun fun times to join dad building something as soon as they can walk. 🙂