I often walk through the dollar store scanning for items that I can use in creating activities. I found some alphabet stickers (which can get a little pricey at the scrapbooking or craft store) so I scooped up a bunch for this game: it is a guided way to make words with stickers. We can teach a lot of pre-reading and spelling skills to preschoolers. When games are hands-on an structured to meet them where they are, the learning happens in fun ways!
Kids love feeling like they can read and spell. This gets preschoolers learning pre-reading and pre-writing skills. You create a word template, and they match it. It’s basically a letter matching game with the goal of building a word.
For older kids this same activity was used to build fall spelling words. For younger kids, this activity will help them see how letters form words when they are put together in deliberate ways. You just need paper and letter stickers. Let’s check it out.
Pre-Reading Activity: Building Words with Stickers
On a piece of paper, I wrote a few common words that we say in our house. I created a little chart as shown in the picture and my son was to make the word using the stickers on the right side of the chart.

I used upper case and lower-case letters, but you can use whatever case matches the stickers if your child is still learning to differentiate between the two.
The three words I used were common words my son said. He was only four at the time that we did this. His curiosity and confidence in reading and spelling was booming. I love that this activity empowered him to feel like a reader.

The other option is to have your child place the stickers right over the letters you wrote (as shown above). If you have a word wall in your home, this would be a fun way to increase awareness of the words.
Use your child’s name or the names of family members as well. There are a lot of ways to make this meet the developmental level of your child.
You can use the color words from our color word spelling game to do this.
Number words and sight word spelling practice is always good even for preschoolers to try. The stickers make it easier to set your child up to be an early reader and speller.
The copy and stick make a word pre-reading activity is perfect for our preschool at home time.
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