Learning with Letters: ABCs On The Clothesline

As soon as the weather is warm enough,  I hang my clothes out on the clothesline. It's a sure sign of spring around these parts and definitely something my children will remember about their mama. I despise laundry in the winter, but it's my favourite chore in nice weather.

When I was teaching kindergarten, I had a clothesline hung up in our house center. The children would play with it endlessly, hanging up little doll clothes and often, their own socks. There's just something so appealing about hanging things on a clothesline—at least, to me and most four year olds!

I decided to play on this love of clothespins and clotheslines to do some letter practice.

What You'll Need:

• string
• paper
• scissors
• marker or pen
• clothespins

Directions:

The idea is very simple. Hang string between two chairs to make a mini clothesline.

Cut little shapes out of paper (we used a sock shape, mostly because it's easy to cut freehand) and add the learning skill you wish to practice. We've been working on matching upper- and lowercase letters lately, so that's exactly what we did. I wrote lowercase letters on the little socks and upper case letters on the clothespins.

Sam decided to practice printing letters on the socks too. Awesome. Love when he wants to practice printing!

I started by putting some names on the clothesline using only the clothespins. Sam then found the matching lower case letters and clipped them to the corresponding clothespins.

After we did a few names, he decided to tackle the whole alphabet. And he did! This was a very engaging activity for him.

There are so many ways to use this clothesline idea:

• hang up doll clothing or socks—wonderful for developing fine motor skills
• match letters or spell words
• match dots to the corresponding numbers
• put things in numerical or alphabetical order
• practice skip counting
• sort based on size, from biggest to smallest
• sort based on weight, from heaviest to lightest

And the list just keeps going! This is one of those activities that is wonderful to keep up your sleeve for a rainy day. It's just so versatile.

And should you be someone who does not love laundry, this may be a great way to spark a love of laundry in your little ones. Perhaps this activity will create teenagers that beg their parents to let them do the laundry!