Letter X Activities for preschool

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Looking for letter X activities? It’s a tricky letter to teach, but we’ve got some fun activities!

We’re finishing up our Letter of the Week activities soon! This week we learned about letter X. Every time we have to do letter X activities, I groan to myself. Why is X even a letter? Couldn’t we just use “ks” and be done with it?

What’s especially hard is that letter X rarely makes its sound at the beginning of a word. Thankfully, I’d already thought through this quite a bit and compiled quite a few letter X activities in my letter of the week curriculum. I just opened it up and chose a few to do this week.

My Three knows his whole alphabet and most of the sounds, so now that we’re almost at the end of our Letter of the Week, we don’t do a lot of individual letter recognition activities. In fact, we began with this whole alphabet activity.

It’s called “X marks the spot.” I drew a map of our playroom and added X’s where I’d hid foam bath letters. Then we used the map to locate the hidden letters.

I was surprised at how difficult map reading was for my Three. This treasure hunt required a lot of direction from me, but he still enjoyed it and asked to play again. Next time I’d set up a very small area and a much simpler map. Our playroom is pretty packed!

It’s fun to do xylophone activities for letter X, even though it doesn’t show the true sound of the letter. This xylophone was a craft and math activity in one. I cut out the rectangles, and my Three had to glue them down in order from largest (he started at the bottom) to smallest.

The classic Tic Tac Toe game is a great math challenge for preschoolers! My Three wrote the wobbly X’s, and I wrote the O’s. I tried to help him see how to get three in a row and how to block me. Again, this was harder than I expected it would be for him, but he enjoyed it. We played many, many games. Occasionally I let him win. 🙂

This was a favorite art project because he loves painting with water colors. I just put down some painter’s tape, he water colored around it, and we pulled off the tape when the project was dry – revealing the letter X.

Here’s a fun science activity. Fill cups with different levels of colored water, and make music with the “xylophone” using a metal spoon. Talk about why a fuller glass makes a lower sound.

This fox craft was inspired by the one we saw on Glued to My Crafts. Before we did the craft, I stretched out the word “fox” and my son helped me spell it. I wanted to help him see where the letter “x” is in the word.

My Three loves the letters of all sizes pages that I’ve laminated and that he can complete with a dry erase marker. He requested more after we were done with this one, so I grabbed a few more from the binder before we moved on to another activity. (See all my handwriting pages here.)

We found toys in the playroom that could be used to form an X. This was easy for him. We used our Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, and straw builders.

Here’s a simple craft. Just paint your child’s hand and arm white and have him make a print. When it’s dry, add Q-tips for the bones in the X-ray.

Finally, this was a fun, active way to reinforce letter X. I put two X’s on the carpet with painter’s tape. Then he exercised from one to the other using different movements: running, jumping, crawling, rolling, taking tiny steps, stomping, moving like a snake, etc. He could have done this all day!

This is just a sampling of letter X activities, so be sure to check out my popular ebook for hands-on lesson ideas for every letter!