7 Spanish Alphabet Activities To Do with Your Preschooler

We use these 7 EASY tips to teach the Spanish Alphabet and encourage Spanish literacy at home.

After years of talking about teaching my kids to read and write in Spanish, I officially decided to take the bull by the horns and strategically start teaching them this year. You know what was holding me back from starting for the past 4 years? My unrealistic expectations of how perfect every lesson had to be in order to be valuable for my kids. Any other perfectionists hear me?

Here’s the thing…life especially with kids ISN’T perfect. IT’S MESSY. Embrace the chaos and just start.

When it comes to teaching your kids a language, consistency trumps perfectionism every time. If you are just beginning Spanish learning, I wrote this blog with a few easy things that we consistently do in our home to promote bilingualism.

7 Easy Tips to Teach the Spanish Alphabet at home.

We use these 7 EASY tips to teach the Spanish Alphabet and encourage Spanish literacy at home.

I’m going to give you some context to these activities so you understand where I am coming from and have an idea of how to implement them practically. If you just want the activities…scoot down to the first heading. :)

My undergraduate degree is in Early Childhood Development and I taught Bilingual Kindergarten before going to graduate school to study Music Composition and Vocal Performance. (You’d think the two are unrelated, but both areas of study are currently serving me very well.)

There are A LOT of philosophies of “optimal learning” techniques for Preschool Aged children, and people are very, VERY passionate about that. Some people think kids shouldn’t be doing direction instruction activities and should be mostly exploring. Others don’t find value (or have the patience) for all of the exploratory messes…IYKYK.

I honestly think I fall right in the middle of those two philosophies. Kids learn best when engaged and they engage through exploration so well. At the end of the day, MAKE LEARNING FUN and ENGAGING. When your child is fully engaged in the learning, squeeze in a minute or two of direct instruction. And I mean A MINUTE OR TWO. NOT FIVE. Show them how to form the letter. Tell them the sound it makes. Maybe show them how to blend a familiar consonant and vowel together.

My 4 year old LOVES to explore, is very creative and really intelligent. He hates to sit down and write. He doesn’t want to make alphabet letters at home. He wants to make exploding fart-bomb rockets with his play doh. And I let him do those things while we sing an alphabet song (or listen to the Captain America theme song). We probably do the “letter portion” of these activities 10-15% of our playtime. And that is all he needs. He’ll pick it up as he grows. I’m exposing him to the concepts and not turning every fun activity into a fight. Do yourself the favor and let your kids play and squeeze in some sneaky direct instruction in the middle when you can.

Ok…on to our 7 tips!

1. Pick one letter every 2 weeks. Yup, you heard that correctly! Focusing on just one letter for 2 weeks means you can get into more long-term memory skills with your child. If you stick to that schedule consistently, you’ll have covered the entire alphabet in 1 calendar year. If you get behind (say somebody gets sick or you go on vacation), it’s much easier to catch up. It’s an attainable pace in the midst of a busy life. If you need help coming up with a schedule, join our mailing list and download our free Spanish Abecedario (Abecedario is Spanish for Alphabet 😊).

2. Have a “command center” of learning where you can connect visual cues and letters. We have a wall in our kitchen where we keep our Spanish calendar. It is right next to our refrigerator. Those are our “Spanish wall” spaces. We use magnetic letters, display letter projects, familiar words that make the letter sound and put up our weekly poem for our kids to see and play with. You can keep everything at a desk or on a bookshelf. The point is, let your child SEE the letter frequently and connect it to words, poems and sounds during that two week period.

3. Use a letter chant to learn the sound that the letter makes. Here is our approach. We teach letter sounds the same way we teach our children animal sounds. “What does a cow say? MOOOOO.” and then you play with making silly moooing noises while you point to a cow. Guess what? Letters make sounds just like animals make sounds. You can play with foam/magnetic letters when you’re first introducing the letters. Do it at the breakfast table or in the bathtub at night. Even give the letters a silly personality. Kids love to play and their minds take in information best when they are in a playful state. Once we introduce the letter and the sound it makes, we have a chant we use in our Little Chords preschool classes. Here’s how it goes. I start by making a steady beat pattern alternating between patting my legs and clapping my hands. Once we have a steady beat going (about a measure or two of quarter notes for you music nerds out there), we add the words in Spanish:

O dice* O - (pat legs and clap hands with steady tempo)

O dice O - (pat legs and clap hands with steady tempo)

O - O - O - O (cup your hands around your mouth and make the letter sound)

O dice O - (pat legs and clap hands with steady tempo)

*pronounced "Dee-say"

We squeeze this letter chant into life whenever we can. Squeeze it in during school pick ups/drop offs, during bath time, or start the chant while your kids are waiting for you to cut up their chicken nuggets into bite-sized pieces. They easily catch the pattern once you start it can take over with enthusiasm.

4. Use a Spanish Alphabet Notebook to practice letter writing. Have you downloaded our Spanish Alphabet Notebook yet? Each page has a traceable letter, a line of blank handwriting lines and the bottom half of the sheet is blank for free letter formation practice. (My boys were slower in their fine-motor skill development, and they struggled with the lines. It’s 100% normal for this age…don’t freak out.) We print all of the letter pages, slip those pages into plastic sheet protectors, and put them in a 1 inch, 3-ring binder. My kids use dry erase markers and an eraser to practice tracing the letter. They LOVE dry erase markers, and we are saving some trees by reusing our letter practice worksheets. Yes…I said worksheets. Worksheets are not the devil…some kids do very well with them. Honestly, this activity is not really one of my kids preferred activities, BUT they do need to be able to write their name in Kindergarten, and this is a way I have found to GET THEM to practice. Also, this notebook serves as a way to organize any special projects we do with the letter during our 2 week period. (Think…any special projects put on your Spanish display wall.) We hole-punch the project (or stick in another sheet protector) and file it right behind our handwriting letter page. The notebook becomes a picture dictionary of sorts, and a tool your child can use to help remember letter sounds independently.

5. Tactile letter formation activities. Preschoolers are still developing their fine motor skills. Holding a pencil and moving it to form letters is CHALLENGING for their little hands. So we practice with lots of different mediums to strengthen those fine motor skills. Here are a few things we do: We take two fingers and trace the letter shape in the air with BIG motions (bonus points if you make airplane noises while you trace.) We write the letter in flour, in sand, in shaving cream, in whip cream, with finger paints, etc. Pro-tips: 1. Always use 2 fingers. Their fingers are tiny and letters made with only 1 finger are hard to see in sand/shaving cream. 2. Teach your child to start letter formation from the top of the letter and move down. It is easier for a child to control movements moving from top to bottom vs bottom to top. If you practice these habits during letter formation activities, your child will be more likely to repeat these patterns when using a writing utensil. We also use play doh, blocks and other materials to build 3-D replicas of the letter of the week. Get creative and think outside of the paper and pencil box. Are you at a park on a beautiful day? Take a stick and write in the dirt. Collect a bunch of small pebbles and form them into the shape of the letter. The more you do this, the more your child will start to catch on and even spontaneously initiate these learning moments. Also, remember at the beginning how I said we probably do the letter portion for about 10-15% of the time? Your child will probably want to play with the sand and build with the blocks for 90% of the time. LET THEM! They’re having fun. They’re developing their creativity, their ability to put thoughts and sentences together as they talk in their play and their fine motor skills and they’re being kids. Sneak in a letter lesson for a minute or two during that play time.

6. Read in Spanish. I’m sure you have heard the statistic that reading 20 minutes a day exposes your child to 1.8 million words per year. Reading is a vital element to becoming fluent in Spanish. The whole point of learning letter sounds is to eventually be able to blend letters together to form words. So you need to be developing oral vocabulary so that when the time comes to read, they have a “bank” of words in their brain to be able to pull from when sounding out new words with letters. Truthfully, I buy way more books in Spanish than English because I have a great local library that I can utilize for English books right up the road. That library has an ok selection of Spanish books (which I take advantage of, and you should too!), but it’s still not great.When we find a book we love that complements our learning or my children’s current interests, we buy it to keep on our shelves at home. Also, (Libby, the library reading app has some titles in Spanish. Check out scholastic as well.) YouTube is a great resource. There are many books that are read in Spanish online. I really like this channel. If you are not a Spanish speaking parent, but are wanting to help your child learn, these are wonderful tools to use. I recommend using the app in conjunction with the screen, not just listening, because the visual cues on the videos or illustrations in the books will aid tremendously in comprehension. Kids actually learn to read using the pictures of a book first, and then the words. Take advantage of the illustrations and animated videos to learn vocabulary!!

7. Do a letter hunt in a book, around the house or at a store. Along with reading, it is important for your child to start recognizing letters that they see in everyday life. We use magnifying glasses, flashlights and binoculars to go on “letter hunts” at my house. If I’m working on specific letter sounds, I pull out Spanish books that we have read and we try to find those letters on each page. Going to the grocery store is a great place to find Spanish words. Find your favorite taco aisle and read the food labels. Also, many toys and electronic sections have instructions in Spanish somewhere on the box. Over the summer we read “Let’s go on a bear hunt” in Spanish and then I hid the letter O (for oso…it means bear) around the house on post-it notes and the kids had to find all of the letters. Make it fun and an adventure! When you find a letter, remember to make the letter sound the letter makes to reinforce the learning.

The bottom line in all of this is to take advantage of learning every day. Do you go to the grocery store with your kids weekly? Find some Spanish words, search for your letter of the week and make some letter sounds while looking at the can of goya frijoles. Get some colored soap paint at target and write your letter and make the letter sound on the side of the tub while you're washing off the end-of-the-day grimes before bedtime. Swap out your favorite bedtime story for a Spanish bedtime story (we do 50/50 at our house so we’re working on reading in both English and Spanish languages daily.) Here are some of our favorite books with easy, repeatable language patterns. Start by listening to them online if you are not comfortable reading the books, then slow transition to reading them yourself. Parents, if you are not fluent, don’t be intimidated to sound out words and look things up online. You are modeling for your children how to find information so that when they get stuck, they know how to find the answer themselves too.