Outdoor alphabet hunt and CVC words

I love any activity that requires lots of energy and has a little learning involved so I was really excited when I put this one together.  


First, I took my favorite toy, our foam bath letters, and hid them around our yard.  We did this the first time on a gorgeous and warm fall morning.  We had a great deal of fun. 

Can you spy the letters I hid in these pictures? 

Using sidewalk chalk, I wrote five CVC words on our patio.  The letters I used corresponded to the letters I hid. 

It took about 5 minutes to prep and then I turned Mini Me loose outside.  

The object of the game was to find the foam letters, place them on their chalk counterparts on the patio, and then when all the letters were located we were going to read the words.  

Mini Me was off and running to find the first letter.

He placed them on the chalk letters as he found them.

Our little observer quickly found the decoy letters I "hid" just for her and immediately started to copy her big brother.  She tenderly placed her letters on the patio near his.   Talk about adoration!

There was a lot of running involved.  Mini Me was so excited when he found a letter and would dash back to the patio to put it in the right spot.  

Almost done!  

Next we started sounding out each word.  This required a little more help from me, but Mini Me did a fantastic job saying the letter sounds.  

Can you see him saying /p/ for P? 

Out of five words, he read three entirely on his own and I helped put the sounds together in the other two.  He was E-X-C-I-T-E-D each time he read a word and I actually jumped up and down when he read the first two words!

We did two rounds of this activity the first day and it has become a most requested game ever since.  How can we not love something that involves running outside and reading?