Provide a stack of magazines and scissors. Ask your preschoolers to look through the pages of the magazines for pictures of things that begin with a letter. Help them find pictures of apples, airplanes or astronauts for the letter A. Search for pictures of babies, bottles or bugs for the letter B. Instruct the children to cut the pictures from the magazines. Give each child a piece of construction paper and a glue stick. Ask youngsters to glue the pictures to the construction paper in any pattern they choose to create a picture-collage of things that begin with the same letter.
Buy alphabet-shaped pasta to use in an art project. Pour the pasta on the art table. Ask each preschooler to find all 26 letters of the alphabet and place the letters in a pile. Make sure that you have enough of the letter shapes so that each child can pick out the full alphabet to use in an art project. Glue a yellow construction paper circle to a slightly larger red or blue paper circle so the paper resembles a bowl of soup. Let the children glue each letter shape to the paper. Glue a plastic spoon to the bowl to complete the project.
Give each child a handful of craft dough or modeling clay to create three-dimensional letter sculptures. Provide pictures of the letters that you plan for them to sculpt. Talk about the way the letter is formed. Point out the curve of an O or a C. Discuss the straight lines that make up the letter T or L. Encourage preschoolers to trace the shape of the finished sculptures with their fingers. When everyone has created a letter from the dough and finger-traced it, ask them to squish it up and form another letter. Make a sculpture for each letter of the alphabet.
Before class, use a white crayon to draw a letter on white pieces of construction paper. At art time, pass one of the papers to each child. Provide watercolors and paintbrushes. Ask the children to paint all over the paper with the watercolors to reveal a secret letter. Buy letter-shaped foam paint-stampers where crafts or teacher supplies are sold. Cut a letter shape from a sheet of card stock. Let preschoolers dip the stampers into paint, then press them onto the matching card stock shape.