Clothes Pin Letter Recognition Activity for Kids

Today I have a fun clothes pin letter recognition activity for kids. As a bonus, it doubles as a fun motor activity for preschoolers and maybe even toddlers. It’s super fast to set up, and you can cater it to whatever letter, shape, number, or color you want to work on for the day. Even better, all it takes is two items you can pick up from the dollar store.

Clothes pins and I go way back. My mom was very committed to teaching us to work hard at a very young age. I remember hauling my own laundry outside as a 4-year-old. I had to carry 2 buckets with me, one to carry my laundry and one to stand on so I could reach the clothes line. For each piece of clothing I would climb up and down off of my bucket, clipping the wet clothes to the line with our well used and weathered clothes pins. My sister and I would often sneak a few off the line to use as fasteners for our bed sheet designed princess dresses during our pretend play games. Needless to say, I’ll always have a place in my heart for the little things.

For this letter recognition activity, I started with a set of wide popsicle sticks that I picked up from our local Dollar Tree. I used a Sharpie to write letters across the stick, making sure to include upper and lowercase letters. I chose a focus letter for each popsicle stick and wrote several of that letter mixed with other consonants and vowels.

After that, you just hand the child a pile of clothes pins, and let them clip away. Their goal is to cover all of the focus letters with clothes pins. They can pinch, open, and wiggle as many times as they need to get the pin in just the right place. I love this activity because it is a lot of fun for the kiddos, it’s fast, easy, and you can store the sticks to use over and over again. I hope you love it too, and have a great time learning today.