Letter D Craft: D is For Dog & Dalmatian

Inside: Letter D craft with a free printable template. Add this to your stash of favorite letter crafts for preschoolers, or plan to use it during your fire safety unit when you talk about how dalmatians are firehouse dogs.

Letter D Craft

This adorable letter D craft is just begging for you to make it! Your preschoolers can use their fingers to paint dots on it, turning a plain dog into a dalmatian. The free printable template makes prep easy for you.

Materials Needed

printout of template next to some of the supplies needed

The materials for this are pretty basic:

Printout of the template (see the end of this post to get a copy)
Black paper for the dog’s ear
Colored paper for the dog’s collar (I used yellow)
Full sheet of colored paper for the background (I used red)
Scissors
Glue stick
Washable black paint & sponge, or a black stamp pad
Googly eye (optional)
Pencil
Felt tipped marker or pen

Preparation

First, print out the pages that work best for the number of kids you have. The free printable includes several variations so that you don’t have to waste paper whether you have a large class or just one child. You may want to print the collars on colored paper (see step 4 below).

Next, to get this ready for your preschoolers, you’ll want to cut out the pieces ahead of time. Start by cutting out the letter D and the tails.

hands cutting out the dog's ear shape from the template

Then, cut out and trace the ear shape onto black paper, or you can just plan to have the children paint/color the white paper.

hands tracing around the dog ear template onto black paper

Finally, cut out the dog collar shapes. Again, you can cut these from colored paper (you can see that I used yellow paper for this), or just plan to have the children color them.

How Kids Can Make the Letter D Craft

Now for the kid-friendly part!

First, have the children put black fingerprints on the letter D cutout to form the dog’s spots.

Letter D cutout with black fingerprints painted on it, shown next to a sponge with black tempera paint on it.

Once the paint is dry, glue the letter D onto a background sheet of paper. Then, glue on the ear, collar, tail, and googly eye.

Next, gently fold/curl the ear under a little to give it a 3-D effect.

hands folding the dog's ear to give it a 3D effect

Finally, label the finished letter D craft with a title and the child’s name.

Finished letter D craft all decorated to look like a Dalmatian dog, shown next to colorful scissors and a glue stick. — Oops! Spell Check tells me that I was misspelling Dalmatian. It ends in *-ian*, not *-ion*.

I hope you and your littles have fun making these doggies! If you’d like to make some more letter crafts, I have some construction-themed ones, as well as an O is for Ocean and R for Recycling letter R craft that you might like.

in process letter R craft with the edge of a hand holding a glue stick

bulldozer craft with a lowercase letter b as the shovel in front

Teaching Kids the Letters of the Alphabet

Here’s a little background for you…

Once children know the letter names from singing the alphabet song, you can start to teach them the letter shapes. You don’t necessarily need to teach the letters in order or have a “letter of the week“, although I recognize how popular that is.

As I said in my letter R craft post recently, I think that using letter crafts is a fun way to introduce letter shapes as well as to teach letter sounds. Which part of that equation you emphasize will depend on each student:

For children who are just learning what the letters look like, be sure to talk a lot about the letter name before, while, and after they work. You can also mention that “dog” starts with the /d/ sound, but don’t make that your main focus.

For children who can already recognize the letter D, you can focus more on why we’re decorating it this way. You can emphasize the /d/ sound in the words dog and dalmatian, and even talk about other words that also start with the letter D.

Download the Letter D Craft Template

Ready for the free printable template to make this craft as easy as possible for you?

To get your very own copy, you can sign up right here:

I’ll add you to my weekly-ish newsletter too – it’s full of ideas and more free printables. Of course, you can unsubscribe at any time.

letter D decorated to look like a Dalmatian dog

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