Working on letter and number order with learning webs is a simple way to work on letter and number literacy. It is also a great fine motor activity for kids. I love it when I come up with an activity that works on a variety of skills. It is like being able to layer learning.
Letter Literacy Web
I started out creating a letter web. Some of the children I work with in school are struggling with the alphabet. I find them singing a letters of the alphabet as we work with letter order. Why not create a learning tool that would work on letter literacy and fine motor weaving I thought? They could sing while they worked on it, but they wouldn’t have to. More than anything it would help put the alphabet in their visual and muscle memory.
When I thought about putting the web together, I decided that I could write the letters on the small white paper plate and my son could use the hole punch to place a hole beneath each letters. That would give him a fine motor exercise to do. ( He just loves using a hole punch!)
With holes under the letters it was time to try weaving the yarn up and down through the holes. This literacy weaving activity is a little tricky. Sometimes you push the yarn into the holes under the letter and sometimes you have to push the yarn up through the holes. We found it was easier to push the yard down into the holes than it was to push it up into holes as we moved through the alphabet.
When we reached the end of the alphabet, we tied off the yarn. We were left with a really cool letter and web design that I think spiders and kids would love.
Number Literacy Web
The letter literacy web was such fun. We decided to create a number literacy web on a paper plate. We used the numbers up to 20. This gave us a little more space between holes. (The letter literacy web had to have 26 holes.)
I tried to write a number under one of the holes and then turn the plate 90 degrees and write the next number in number order. I did well in some cases and poorly in others. The web would have been prettier with more diagonal numbers or vertical ones. The horizontal numbers created straight lines in the web.
We followed the same weaving steps we did with the letter literacy web. Yarn was woven up and down through the holes beneath the numbers in number order.
Both web ended up being pretty. Both literacy webs worked out to be good ways to review number or letter order. I plan on sharing them with the kindergarten teachers I know.
If you are looking for more web activities, you might want to check out my sight word tape web.