Ultimate List of Montessori-Inspired Sticker Activities – Language Edition
Children love stickers. Fact.
And did you know how incredible stickers can be as a learning tool?
Stickers not only provide fantastic fine motor practice for little fingers, they can also be used to teach concepts such as patterning, matching, visual discrimination and more.
In this post, I am focusing on how you can use stickers to help your child with their language development in the early years, including reading and writing.
These are all Montessori-aligned ideas which means that the activities are hands-on, and, where appropriate, there is a ‘control of error’ (so the child can self-correct their work without the help of an adult).
For these ideas, you’ll want to invest in any collection of stickers, as long as they are plain and you can write on them. You could also invest in lower case alphabet stickers if you wanted, though I’ve found it’s more cost effective to get plain dot stickers. I’ve linked the ones I use below.
2,100 coloured dot stickers (8mm) (affiliate link)
With all that out of the way, here is my ultimate list of Montessori-inspired sticker learning activities – the reading and writing edition.
Letter matching
Write letters clearly on a piece of paper and provide the same letters on stickers to your child. For the control of error, only provide the letters required and the correct number of stickers.
Letter recognition and formation
Choose a letter that your child is learning, write it very large on a piece of paper and have your child stick stickers onto the letter. To help them learn letter formation too, indicate where to start sticking and which direction to go. They could trace the letter with their finger first to help them remember.
Name recognition
You can try the same activity above, but with your child’s name. You can write their name and have them stick the stickers onto the letters so they can learn to recognise the spelling of their name.
Upper and lowercase letter matching
Write some upper or lowercase letters on paper and provide the matching letter stickers to your child. Have your child match the uppercase to the lowercase letter or vice versa. As a control of error, you can provide an alphabet chart for the child to reference to check their work.
Put the letters in order
If your child is working on learning the chronology of the alphabet, you can provide stickers with the letters of the alphabet all mixed up and ask them to put the stickers in alphabetical order. As a control of error, you can provide an alphabet chart for the child to reference to check their work.
Fill in missing letters – alphabet
A slight variation on the above activity is to write the alphabet out with some letters missing. Provide only the letter stickers that are missing as the control of error. Another way the child can check their work, is to sing the alphabet song as they point to each letter and that way they may notice if they put a letter in the wrong place.
Fill in missing letters – spelling
Filling in missing letters is also a supportive way to help learners practise their spellings. You can start simply with CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words for beginner readers with one sticker for each missing letter. The child could identify beginning, middle or end sounds in this way.
To add more challenge, you could move onto identifying digraphs (e.g. th, sh, ch) or letter blends (e.g. st, pl, cr, etc.) or any number of common spelling rules. You could provide these letter ‘chunks’ to the child on the sticker and they can complete the words. The options really are endless!
DIY movable alphabet using sticker sheets
If you follow or know much about the Montessori method, you may have heard of the movable alphabet. Montessori recognised that children may be ready to write words way before their hands are ready for the physical task of writing.
The movable alphabet material allows children to write words without a pencil! It’s essentially lots of letters that the child can pick up and move to make words.
And you can make your own version using stickers!
Now, once a sticker is used once, it is done. So you will have to have a lot of each letter sticker to allow your child plenty of time to practise and build as many words as they like. But it doesn’t take long to write the letters onto the stickers and even easier if you have invested in several sheets of inexpensive dot stickers like me.
If the movable alphabet is a material you will want to use repeatedly though, I recommend purchasing one – I’ve linked the one I use below (affiliate link).
Make words
For this activity, choose the words you want your child to spell and only provide the stickers needed. For example, when my daughter was just starting out, I would show her a picture of a cat and provide the stickers ‘c’, ‘a’ and ‘t’ mixed up. She would then stick the letters underneath the picture in the right order. She could then check she was right by looking on the back of the picture, where I had written the answer. This can be adapted to suit any level.
Silly sentences
Provide your child with a bunch of words on stickers that you are sure they can read and give them the freedom to build whatever sentences they like! Then have fun reading them together and giggling at their silly sentences.
Match the words to the words
This is similar to the letter matching activity already listed above, but with words. This is a fun way to help cement the idea that words are ‘chunks’ of language and that multiple letters put together make a word. It is also a fun way to help children learn and recognise sight words.
Build the sentence
For this activity, I would recommend using labels for the sticking element. You could start with writing a short sentence out on paper, then writing the same sentence with the words mixed up onto a sticky label. Your child could cut out the words and then match them to the words in the written out sentence.
Listen and build
A more challenging version of the above activity is to say a sentence slowly out loud. You will have provided all the words of the sentence to your child on stickers. Your child has to listen to you carefully and then stick the words in the correct order based on what they heard. You can then show the child the sentence you were saying and they can check if they were right.
Labelling
This activity is a nice way to ease your child into learning about diagrams. Introduce your child to a labelled image of any sort – an animal, body parts, parts of a tree, etc. – and go over each word to introduce the language. You can then provide these words on stickers and ask your child to match them up.
Another version is to provide the image with the labels missing. Using the original labelled image as a control of error, your child can stick the labels in the correct spaces.
Word families
If your child is learning about word families (e.g. -ap, -ig, -op, etc.) give them a series of stickers with the word family written on them and on a separate paper, write down the first letter of the word. Have some images to match with these so your child knows which word family to match. For example:
c _ _
p _ _
t _ _
For above, you would provide images of a cat, pot and top and then stickers with ‘at’, ‘ot’ and ‘op’ written on them. The child would put the stickers next to the correct letter to make the word.
Green for right, red for wrong
If your child finds it difficult to draw tick/check marks or crosses, colour-coded stickers are a great way around that. Any activity where your child has to identify the right or wrong answer, you can provide green stickers for right and red stickers for wrong (or any colour really, as long as you explain what each one is for!)
This is a fantastic activity for spelling practice.
Spot and stick
This is such an easy one to set up! For letter recognition, write loads of letters all mixed up across a piece of paper – one letter will be your main focus so write that one more often than the others. Count how many times you’ve written that letter, then provide that exact number of stickers (any type) to your child. They will then spot that specific letter and stick the sticker on top of it!
You can do the same activity but with sight words or other categories of words too.
Letter mazes
This one takes a few minutes to set up if drawing by hand or you can make it quite easily on your computer.
Draw a grid with lots of columns and rows (consider how much would be appropriate for your child, you don’t want to make it too easy or overwhelm them). Start on the top left hand corner and create a letter maze with one letter you are focusing on. You should end up towards the bottom right corner (or anywhere on the right as long as you indicate it is the end. Then fill in the rest of the spaces with random letters.
Your child can then follow the maze by putting a sticker on the correct letter until they reach the end.
Sorting activities
There are SO MANY language sorting activities you can do with stickers. You can have your child sort letters, word families, words starting with the same initial/middle/ending sound. All you have to do is provide the stickers and a sheet with spaces for them to sort them onto.
Scavenger hunt
Build your child’s vocabulary, spark their inner detective and feed their need to move with this FUN FUN FUN scavenger hunt activity.
And guess what – even non-readers can play.
On stickers, put the names of everyday items from around your house that you know your child can access. Then read out each word (or your child can do this if they can) and have them run to stick the sticker onto the item.
So simple, so good.
There you have it – a grand total of 20 sticker learning activities to promote language development in your young child.
I hope you have so much fun with your child doing these activities. If you do, please connect with me on Instagram and let me know how it goes!
