Alphabet Wash: A Fun Summer Learning Activity

Summer days are approaching and parents are starting rushing outside. With warmer weather and everyone staying home, we need to get creative with our outdoor play. One thing that I have been doing is incorporating play, learning, and the outdoors into fun activities. This alphabet wash was perfect for both my littles and gave us parents a short break while they played and learned outside!

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The Story Behind the Idea

What I mean is the birth of the idea. Our neighbor was emptying his house of years of collected stuff. Knowing that we have little kids, he kindly offered us some brightly colored wooden letters. They just needed to be washed. It was on my to-do list for months and I just never got around to it.

The first warm day of the year I decided to pass this task off to my kids and turn it from a chore to a fun way to learn through play and the idea of an alphabet wash was born!

Find the best alphabet books for toddlers.

How to do an Alphabet Wash

Fill a small kiddie pool with water outside. We use a plastic one which is perfect for this since it is big enough for kids to sit in if they want and won’t pop with toys in it!
Add soap. We used baby soap since we encouraged the kids to get in and wash themselves to count as bathtime too!
Put letters into the pool and give each child a rag to wash them and there you have it. An easy, fun, playful way to learn the alphabet: an alphabet wash!

The wood ones I used were really old but you can totally use either of these foam options to do this fun activity. Click on the pictures to see more.

Benefits of an Alphabet Wash

I like to design a lot of our activities to have some sort of learning element. During this alphabet wash, my youngest learned about colors while my oldest practiced the sounds of the letters he washed and put them in alphabetical order to dry. They were having a blast splashing around in the soapy water and learning in the process! We had to repeat the activity the next day since they loved it so much.

Check out more ideas for learning the alphabet through play.

Learning through play was only one of the benefits I found in this activity. Here are a few more of the benefits of doing an alphabet wash.

Sensory Play

Sensory play in the form of both water play and bubble play! These are great sensory activities and help kids develop an awareness of the world around them.

Responsibility

Cleaning the letters gave them a task and made them feel like they are helping, which they were! Both my 19-month-old and my 4-year-old loved the alphabet wash and played with it for hours. Mom win!!!

Pride

They could see that they were washing dirt off and took pride in doing a good job.

Bathtime

Since we used baby soap, it also served as bathtime! The kids got all soapy and then we hosed off when they were done. Talk about two birds with one stone!