Literacy Spot #48: Letter Stamps (and Christmas Decorations!)

Early literacy learning

Most children love to stamp and letter stamps are a great addition to your writing area once your children are interested in exploring and playing with letters.

letter stamp activities

Of course, you aren’t just limited to stamping on paper. Stamping on playdough, salt dough or air dry clay is lots of fun too. I like the challenge of air dry clay for children as it takes stronger muscles for their hands and fingers to work, and this is important to developing those fine motor skills necessary for writing later on.

letter stamp activities

Immy had a great time searching out the letters she knows and stamping them onto our Christmas decorations. Now we just need to wait for them to dry, add a ribbon and hang them on our tree 🙂

What is Childhood 101′s Literacy Spot? It is a weekly reminder of the importance of young children learning playfully as each week I share one idea for playing around with literacy, taken from my many years working as an early childhood teacher. Visit the previous Literacy Spot posts for more fun ideas for playing with literacy.

9 Comments

  1. Kerry Morris says:

    Where did you find the letter stamps?

    1. These were from eBay, Kerry. They are quite small which made them perfect for our ornaments. I have seen others in large craft stores.

  2. Even the box of stamps is beautiful!

    The ornaments are wonderful; gorgeous and simple. I am adding this to my pinterest board to make in the future.

  3. What dough did you stamp on in the pictures and how do I make it? Thanks:)

    1. Hi Lea,
      We used a porcelain air dry clay (Crayola brand) for our ornaments. Softening the clay in our hands, rolling it out and punching the shapes with cookie cutters. Then we used the letter stamps to imprint the letters and added a hole for the string 🙂

  4. My favorite part – the ornaments look like they were done by a child. I love things that are obviously a child’s work.

  5. We LOVED the idea and I loved how it incorporated some literacy too. We made some salt dough and used a star cookie cutter and my letter stamps to write ‘peace.’ We’re focusing on peace Christmas brings and it was a perfect ornament for our tree. We’re planning on painting it gold later. Thanks for your great ideas!

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