Teach your students how to spell their names with alphabet pasta. This hands-on activity will help them learn to recognize the letters that make their name, and it will also help them learn to eventually write their own names. Provide each student with alphabet pasta letters that spell out their name. Help each student glue the letters to a piece of heavy paper. Encourage each student to point to each letter and spell out the name. Provide additional art supplies, such as glitter, buttons, stickers and crayons and ask each student to decorate the name.
Have your students make people out of alphabet pasta letters to help build letter recognition skills. Provide students with an assortment of different alphabet letters and markers. Show the students how to glue each letter to a piece of heavy paper and then use markers to add arms, legs, feet, hands and hair. Ask the students to introduce their letter people by telling what letter each one is and listing one attribute of that person that starts with the same letter, such as brown hair for "B" or feet for "F."
Collages are an entertaining and engaging way to get students interested in letters and the sounds they make. Provide students with two or three different pasta letters and an assortment of child-friendly magazines. Have each student choose a letter and glue several of that pasta letter to a large piece of paper. Encourage students to cut pictures out of magazines that begin with the same letter and glue them to their collage. Ask students to share their collages to help build letter recognition and reinforce beginning letter sounds.
Have students hide pasta letters in pictures and then challenge their peers to find them. Provide blank paper and a large assortment of craft supplies, such as pom poms, pipe cleaners, glitter, buttons, paper scraps and shaky eyes. Have students choose several pasta letters to glue to their blank paper. Show them how to surround their letters with craft supplies. Encourage them to try to hide their letters among the other craft supplies, without covering them up. Have students trade papers and try to find and identify the hidden letters.