Elf Letter Building Activity for Preschool

Christmas is just around the corner! Your preschoolers can help Santa’s elves build lowercase letters with this hands-on alphabet activity.

Free Elf Workshop Snap Cube ABC Cards shown with lowercase letters a and b built with cubes

Elf ABC Activity

It’s the season of shorter-than-ever attention spans, but I hope these free printable alphabet cards will help you sneak in some fun early literacy practice!

Skills Covered

Once students can sing the ABC song, it’s time to start teaching them about letter shapes. This elf letter building activity will help you cover the following skills for lowercase letters:

Letter recognition
Letter building
Letter tracing (if you use the recording sheet)

If you’re looking to work on both Uppercase and lowercase, you might also like this adorable hands-on reindeer alphabet activity.

What’s Included in the Free Printable

The free printable has 26 lowercase letter cards. There’s also a simple recording sheet where children can trace each letter after they build it.

4 snap cube letter cards for letters a, b, c, and d

Preparation & Materials

This activity uses the snap cubes (or Unifix® cubes) that you may have in your math manipulatives bin.

You can use these cubes for early literacy activities too!

Just print off your cards (you can grab them below), cut them apart, and laminate if desired.

You may want to offer just a small group of letters so that students aren’t overwhelmed.

cubes connected into the shape of a lowercase a, and some loose cubes

How to Play

Your students will pick one card and study how that letter is constructed. Encourage them to count how many cubes are in each segment. You may need to show them how to rotate cubes for the corners so that the ‘bumps’ don’t stick out.

Once they complete a letter they can trace it on the recording sheet.

Depending on how many cubes you have they may need to take apart one letter to get cubes to finish the next letter – especially if they want to use only certain colors.

letters a and b built with snap cubes, next to elf ABC activity cards

Extend the Learning

You can layer in some math skills too. Ask students to count how many cubes there are in each segment, and then how many there are in total. They can also count the number of cubes in each color.

Challenge your fast finishers to create letters where the colors alternate in a specific pattern.

They can also search through the entire deck of cards looking for all the letters in their name. (They might also like this Christmas name tracing activity where they can fill out pretend gift tags.)

Download the Elf ABC Cards

Ready for the free printable activity cards? Your littles will love these!

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