Grocery Store Preschool Lessons: Color Sorting and Letter Recognition

Using Grocery Store Items for Preschool and Homeschooling Activities

Small town living is nice, but it can make it difficult to find materials and resources for home-school and preschool activities and lessons without having to order them online. I'm always on the lookout for schooling materials - even when I go grocery shopping.

A trip to the local grocery store inspired a series of blogs about activities you can do using just materials that you find in a grocery store. On this trip I picked up a box of individually packaged Alphabet Cookies, 2 packs of Alphabet magnets, a small set of tongs, and a set of 6 magnetic bag clips in different colors.

In Part 1, we used the alphabet cookies to match with the letter magnets in order to work on letter recognition. Carrie and I continued working with the magnets, but this time we stuck them to the refrigerator. I put them on the fridge in alphabetical order in order to sing the ABC song and count them (that's the first thing Carrie wanted to do.

After singing and counting. I spelled out a few words using the magnets. "Hex" is a particular one because Carrie loves Sofia the First and especially one particular episode in which one of the characters is putting "hexes" on people. I tried to do words that had one letter from each color group to help prompt Carrie to put the letter back in the correct order. As I mentioned in part one, I meant to get a cookie sheet for this but I still haven't. If I had a sheet, I'd draw the letters on to help with recognition and matching. I really like these magnets because they not only helped us work on letter recognition and sounds but we also used them to work on sorting by color.