Literacy Activities for Preschoolers: Beginning Sound Hats

This week’s Playful Preschool Series theme is hats.

This literacy activity is a fun way to play with hats and stuffed animals. Best of all your preschoolers will be learning about beginning sounds!

Begining Sound Preschool Literacy Activity

Play this fun game with homemade hats to help build literacy skills with preschoolers.

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Why We Chose This Language Activity

There are so many great books about hats. Make sure to check out our list below. My boys love to read about hats, play with hats and make hats.

We are also working on letter sounds so we wanted to incorporate that into our play.

We had a hard time choosing just one hat literacy activity to share with you!

Setting Up and Playing

Materials Needed: paper bowls, markers and a variety of stuffed animals or dolls

1. Gather a collection of stuffed animals or dolls. Six is a good number for this activity.

playing with stuffed animals

2. You will need a paper bowl for each animal that you have collected. Turn your paper bowls upside down and decorate them with markers.

letter sound hats

3. On each hat you will write the letter that represents the beginning sound of each animal. You can decide if you want to use the general name of the animals (ie dog, bear, tiger) or if your animal has a given name (ie our cow’s name is Moo-Bell) you can use that beginning sound/letter. Include the kids in this step. It’s a great language skill building activity!

It is time to play! The goal is to match each letter hat to the correct stuffed toy.

literacy activities for preschoolers 1

Have your kids pick a hat and say the sound the letter represents. For example, if they select the hat with “D” on it, they would say /d/. Then ask, “Which animal starts with the sound /d/?”

They then put the hat on the correct animal.

Take the hats off and play again.

My kids ended up making multiple hats for each animal!

Here are some fun books to read aloud about hats that preschoolers love!
Caps for Sale by Slobodkina is a classic. A peddler with a tower of hats on his head falls asleep under a tree. When he awakes, he discovers the monkeys have taken his hats. How will he get them back?

I Want My Hat Back! by Klassen is a funny tale of a bear who asks all the animals he meets where his hat is. Who has his hat? And, what will become of the hat holder?
Hooray for Hat by Won is another fun read. Elephant is grumpy until he opens his door to discover a hat waiting for him. He sets off to show Zebra his hat which sets a parade in motion.