Letter Y Activities for 2-year-olds

Today we’re sharing some simple letter Y activities for 2-year-olds.

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We’re almost there! For a little over a year, I’ve been sharing the letter of the week activities that I’ve done with my younger daughter (our #5).

Some weeks we spend a lot of time, and some a little … it all depends on what’s going on with the rest of the family.

This week we kept it short and sweet – because a certain 1-year-old has a double ear infection. It’s pretty tough to do any structured learning when the baby is screaming all morning long!

Thankfully, my daughter already recognized letter Y before we began our activities. Short and sweet was just fine!

I began by printing our block letter Y and snipping yarn into tiny pieces. I applied the glue, and my daughter stuck on the yarn. Before long, however, she didn’t like the sticky feeling on her fingers.

What you see in the above picture is as far as we got!

I remembered something I had done with her older brothers, so I decided to give it a try. I peeled the back off a piece of clear contact paper and taped it to the table, sticky side up Then I gave my daughter different lengths of yarn to attach to the contact paper.

She loved this!

If we’d had more time I would have given her many more lengths of yarn, but my toddler was very, very fussy (see above ear infection).

For this craft, I printed and cut out a block letter Y one more time. I also cut out a simple face and hands.

Then my daughter glued them all down on paper and added a yaaaawning face. I love it!

We squeezed an alphabet review activity into the middle of our week. I simply wrote letters on a piece of cardstock. Then my daughter named them as she dotted each one with a Do-a-dot marker.

Since we’ve been reviewing previously learned letters every week, she had over 90% accuracy. Yay!

I grabbed some wooden letters (from this toy) and put them in a pot. Then I printed the entire alphabet on a piece of paper. My daughter pulled each letter out one at a time, found it on the paper, and then dotted it with a marker.

This is quite the multi-step activity and may not work for young twos – but it was perfect for my daughter, who has been learning letters for a long time now and is just over three years old.

This was a big hit! I love the tip from Play to Learn Preschool to use a paintbrush with a salt tray. I wrote each letter on a long sticky note, and my daughter wrote each letter in the salt. Sometimes I had to show her how to form a letter before she was willing to try it.

The great thing about writing in a salt tray is that a gentle shake erases each letter so you can start all over again.

We did easy letters with straight lines and stayed away from tricky letters like the letter S. She’s not ready for those yet.

Finally, she enjoyed listening to me read our Little Letter Y book of songs and nursery rhymes. You can get it for free here.

And there you have it! See you soon for letter Z!

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