I’ve noticed Veronika singing the alphabet to herself a lot lately, and she’s starting to identify a few of the letters correctly by name. This little game seemed like a fun next step to test her letter knowledge. After all, what toddler doesn’t love to squirt things with water?

Ideally, I would have done this activity on a chalkboard so it could be repeated, but I don’t own one large enough. Instead, I wrote out the alphabet in white crayon on a thick piece of black poster board. I then set out a tray with the magnet letters from our fridge and handed her the first one as a test.

“What letter is it?” I asked her. She correctly identified V, and then I asked if she could find the corresponding V on the poster board.

Once she matched each magnet letter to crayon letter, I told her she could spritz her target. Whoa, permission to spritz! She immediately loved this game.

It was eye opening to see which letters she knows (m, v, and i are early ones), and which ones she wasn’t sure (s, r).

Either way, she could always pair a magnet to its corresponding crayon shape even if she didn’t know the letter’s name, simply by matching them, and much more quickly than I would have guessed!

And then came the fun chance to squirt.

This was a great set-up to leave out for her all afternoon, as she happily mixed and matched the magnets or scribbled some more on the “chalkboard”.