DIY Alphabet & Number Gems

My daughter loves learning and we are often working on homeschool projects and games to keep her entertained and learning new things. We're always counting and working on letter recognition and letter sounds, but now she'd really enjoying learning addition and seeing how to spell words. Since we are working on these kinds of activities all the time, I decided to gather a few simple supplies to make learning even easier!

Supplies:
Two bags of large, clear glass gems (usually found in the floral section)
Glitter Foam Letters and Numbers Stickers (from CraftProjectIdeas.com)

Open the bags of gems and separate any that are broken or chipped. I did find two halves of a broken gem and was able to glue them back together with some E6000. Just be sure there aren't any sharp edges.

Peel off the sticker backing and press the glitter foam letters and numbers onto the flat side of the gems. I ended up doing two sets of numbers (0-9) and two sets of alphabet letters, plus a few extra vowels. The letters and number stickers come in about 5 different glittery colors, and the alphabet is all capitalized.

The sticker backing is pretty strong, so there was no need to use any glue at all. Because of that, this makes it an easy project for the kids to work on! Just hand over the gems and stickers and let them get to work.

Once you've got all your stickers in place, it's time to play! We had a lot of fun working on learning a series of words, like words that end in "at", "ot", and "ag" and talked about how they all rhyme and what each word means if she didn't know it already. Plus, it helps her learn to recognize the words more when we're reading and can spell them out loud on her own from memory.

With the number gems, we worked on odd and even numbers, and some addition and subtraction.  I would also ask her questions like how old she is, how many chairs are in the room, etc and have her find the right number to match.

If your child isn't quite ready to read, spell, or do math, no problem!! You can have your child spell their name, arrange the numbers to teach them your phone number, or just let them organize everything by color! The learning possibilities are endless and works for kids of any age, and at any learning level.

I received product from CraftProjectIdeas.com in exchange for this post. All opinions are my own.