A Letter Hunt on The Stairs

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Earlier this year, I realized that Louis just wasn’t grasping his letters.

I had a moment of panic and wondered Why? He’s 4 and his brothers grasped them much earlier.

So I started doing letter activities with him to help him begin to identify them. He knew the letters in his name well, so I started with those and built on them to build his confidence.

This letter hunt on the stairs totally engaged him and he did it several times.

It worked well because I also included numbers for him. Louis is amazing with numbers and gets excited about them. So that’s how I got him excited about the activity.

I chose five letters to begin with and wrote them on sticky notes (affiliate link). I wrote several of each. If there were 3 of one letter, I wrote a little 3 in the corner of the note. If there were 5 of a letter, I wrote a 5 on the corner, and so on. I tried to make every letter have a different number.

I then stuck the sticky notes on the stairs, two or three per step. We did it several times with different amounts, so it doesn’t matter how many you start with.

We also did this hunt on the stairs for sight words

Then I simply asked Louis to find the letters on the stairs.

Can you find 3 B’s?

If he struggled with the letter, he could look in the corner for that number 3.

I constantly asked him to remind me what letter he was looking for as he searched up and down the stairs to reinforce the letter to the shape of it.

Once he found all the sticky notes of one letter, he stacked them into a pile at the top of the stairs.

When he finished the ’round’ we went over the letters again to reinforce them one more time.

Sometimes he started to grasp it, sometimes not.

After getting the hang of it, we started just walking up and down the stairs shouting out the letters as we stomped on them.

If you don’t have stairs — get creative! Trail the letters along a few hallways, up and down a wall, or along the kitchen cabinets.

As for learning his letters. I’m not sure how much our letter activities have to do with it, but a couple of weeks ago I realized that Louis not only knows all his letters (both upper and lowercase, with the exception of W that he always gets stuck on), he also knows his letter sounds. I was amazed how it all clicked for him so fast.

I honestly don’t think our letter activities have a lot to do with it. He was just ready to learn now and that’s when he soaked it up. But the letter activities can’t hurt!

How can you use a “hunt” game to help your child learn?

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