Do A Dot Letter Marking

I have been challenged lately to find new and "exciting" letter activities.  The girls love Do a Dot markers, so I decided to write letters all over a page and have the girls color each letter with a different color (I made a chart for each page).  For Sabrina I made pages with two letters:

After a few pages, Sabrina was able to do 3 letters correctly:

I found it interesting that she would color an O, than a P, than an O, alternating.  This required her to switch markers every single time.  Catherine's work style was different: she picked up the first marker and colored every single letter, than she switched to the next letter.  I gave Catherine 5 letters at a time:

Catherine asked to do numbers, so I gave her a sheet of 1's and 2's:

This was a fun activity which I highly recommend you try.  It cost me nothing because I just used recycled paper.  I made the sheets up as the girls were doing them and was able to clean the kitchen at the same time.  Sabrina is still learning her letters and asked frequent questions like "Is this a P?"  She also had to remember to keep going back to the "chart" to remember what color went with each letter.

Catherine knew all the letters, of course.  But I think it was a helpful exercise for her too because she had to scan the page for a particular letters, which is great practice for reading.  I also loved her innate work efficiency: she picked up the first color, marked all of those letters, and then moved on to the next color.  On some later sheets, I wrote in some extra letters which were not the target letters to trick her.  She immediately noticed the extra letters and pointed them out to me. 

For both it was also a good lesson on reading a legend for information, but we actually called it a "chart."

Another great advantage to this activity is that it kept the girls busy long enough for me to clean the kitchen!