5 Creative Alphabet Activities for Kids: Teach Letters with Food, Movement & Storytelling

Updated: Originally posted in March 2021. Refreshed and reposted with new links, book updates, and learning strategies for 2025.

Learning the alphabet is one of the first big steps toward reading, but holding the attention of a busy, curious child isn’t always easy. The average 5-year-old can stay engaged for about five minutes at a time. So how do you turn those five minutes into twenty?

At Little Chewz, we believe in using movement, creativity, food, and fun to help kids build reading readiness. Our Food-Based Literacy approach helps children learn why reading matters, not just how. And when you teach the alphabet in a way that connects with their senses and learning style, everything starts to click.

Whether your child is a Little Chewz Detective (focused and analytical), Explorer (hands-on and active), or Artist (creative and expressive), these five alphabet activities are designed to build vocabulary, letter recognition, emotional confidence. And yes… some of them are delicious!

1-Get started with some yoga cards

This is a great activity for our Little Chewz Artists! Yoga reduces stress and gives children a peaceful energy, two areas that can affect the process of learning to read. If a child is stressed or frustrated, learning to read becomes more difficult. A child could begin to feel as though it is too hard or that they will never be able to learn the alphabet. Small wins are key. Yoga brings movement and small wins. These yoga cards are what I used in my training with Rainbow Kids Yoga and cards that I continue to use as a French teacher today in my classroom. The students love trying new poses and are challenged to try to figure out what letter pose their classmates are doing. My students also love creating their own.

2-Get in the kitchen

This is a great activity for our Little Chewz Explorers! One of the best ways to learn how to read is to get into the kitchen. Letters are everywhere and it shows children WHY they are learning to read (think reading ingredients and recipes). Have them make chocolate letters by piping chocolate (great for fine motor) on wax paper and then let them harden. As they are piping the chocolate, they are learning proper letter formation and saying the letter and the letter sound out loud as they are piping. Once the letters have hardened, they can use them to make words. You can also use your letters to decorate cupcakes or eat as is!

Try adding alphabet pasta letters to your soup. When your child takes a spoonful of soup, they tell you the letters they see, the sounds they make and what words begin with these letters. Make it a fun challenge to see how many letters you can find.

Finally, you can make dough (cracker or cookies) and use cookie cutters to cut out the letters. Bake them and have them for snack. Each time a cracker goes in the mouth, they must say the sound it makes. Check out our Little Chewz Pinterest page here for recipe inspiration.

3-Go on a treasure hunt

This activity is perfect for our Little Chewz Rangers! There are a few ways you could do a treasure hunt. You could have your child create a list of all the treasures that they love or would like to find outside. Have them draw a picture and talk about what letter each treasure begins with, then go outside and find as many treasures off their list as they can find or challenge their peers to help them look.

Another way you could do a treasure hunt, is to go outside and go for a hunt. As you find random objects along the way, you name them, say what letter they begin with or how many letters are in the word. Eg-if your child finds an acorn, ask them if they know what it is. Sound it out, ask them what letter it starts with, ask them how many times we can break up the word or even how we could use this word in a sentence. "Acorn starts with the A". Have them make the sound. "There are 5 letters in the word ACORN, show me 5." Then try to make a sentence with the new word. "The acorn fell on the ground." Then ask your child, "what other words start with the letter A".

4-Get crafty

This is a great activity for our Little Chewz Artists and Entertainers! If your child is the artistic type, then nothing sparks joy like glitter, glue, and a little goop! Creative kids thrive when they can dive into hands-on projects. Because they’re fully engaged in the process of making something, they naturally form an emotional connection to their creation, and that strong connection helps them remember the letter long after the craft is complete.

Try an alphabet necklace and then have them show it off to the family and name the letters they used. Create a rainbow and talk about each color included and what letter that color begins with. Create a sensory bin and throw a bunch of letters in the mix. This will give them the challenge to go and find all the treasures including the letters, which they can check off as they go. Have them make a puppet or an object that represents each letter of the alphabet, such as an apple for the letter A. The activities are endless and there is so much fun to be had. Make sure they help with the clean up! If you would like a book that matches the alphabet, then our fall book is a great choice! Check it out here. Coming soon!

5-Find it in a book or a song

This is an activity our Little Chewz Detectives & and Artists will enjoy! As a French Immersion teacher, I personally feel that my students have always learned the best and the fastest through music. Music is essentially words. When lyrics to their favorite song are placed on paper, and they can sing the song, it won't be long before they can follow along with their finger and read the words associated with the song. Children will sing a song before they know what it means or how to read it. Use this opportunity to introduce your child to many songs, lots of singing and dancing too. Next time you ask your child to read with you, they will sing and dance all the way to their next book. 

We love to also go for treasure hunts inside a book. Looking for letters and words and matching them with the illustrations. Children love grabbing a magnifying glass and going on a book hunt. After I published Little Chewz Celebrates Fall, I noticed the fun students and teachers were having in bringing this book to life. But sometimes books that are not a good fit can cause frustration with a child when they are learning to read. So I decided to release an alphabet book that goes along with our Little Chewz Celebrates Fall book. There will be a total of 3 early readers in the fall ABC series. Alphabet books are a great entry point in learning how to read. Although, the level 3 is a bit tricky, the level 1 is just 2 words per page to represent the alphabet. Just learning letters in a book may seem a bit too basic, but you are teaching your child that objects are attached to words, words make up sentences and sentences make up a book! Below you will find a link to our books to get started in learning the alphabet.

BOOKS:

Little Chewz Celebrates Fall

Little Chewz ABC Adventure Level 1 (pictured above)-Coming soon!

Have fun movin' and shakin' to your next story! We would love to hear your favorite way to learn the alphabet!