Easy Early Childhood Crafts and Activities for the Letter U
Looking for some fun crafts and hands-on activities for the letter U that work for early childhood? Try a few of these easy crafts and engaging activities to help your child learn all about the letter U. And grab all of our free printables that go with the letter of the week activities.
The letter U may seem hard, but there’s lots of fun things and educational activities you can do with this letter! We have a few great options below that work for toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarteners.
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Fun Letter U Art Activities
Check out these fun but simple crafts and art activities that we love to do in preschool, but also work for toddlers and kindergarteners. These are a fun way to start learning the letter U!
Cute Umbrella Craft with Cupcake Liners
Cupcake liners are a great way to make your own umbrellas! Just turn them inside out, and let your child color them with markers or dot dot markers. Then, fold the liners and glue onto your page.
Underwater Craft
If you’re looking for more letter crafts, this underwater craft is a fun one for young kids, especially to practice scissor skills. Adding stickers is also a great opportunity to add more fine motor practice to craft time. We used these fish stickers.
Underground Craft
Another fun craft we like to do with the letter U is this underground one! It’s also great for scissor skills and using stickers. These are the bug stickers we like to use.
Up Craft
One of our favorite art activities for little hands is this painting activity based on the story of Up. If your child doesn’t know that one, you can also take out the house and just make balloons.
Letter U Free Printable Template and Coloring Pages
We have a few free printables we use for letter U activities. Lots of kids just have so much fun coloring the pictures or decorating the letter of the alphabet. There’s so many different ways you can help with letter formation and recognition!
Download all the free template in PDF for each picture below.
A fun activity that fits anywhere in the week is decorating and/or cutting out the umbrellas! You can draw an umbrella outline or use this template. PDF version is found here.
Uppercase Letter U template– PDF version is found here.
Upper and Lowercase Letter U template — PDF version is found here.
U for Umbrella Coloring Page — PDF version is found here.
U for Unicorn Coloring Page– PDF version is found here.
Letter U Fine Motor Activities
Our first activity that focuses on fine motor skills is a super simple sensory bin that’s themed around Underwater! We originally used it as an ocean themed sensory bin, but it also works well for the letter U, especially if you do the underwater craft above and want to add a sensory experience. Read all about how to build the sensory bin and the objects we used here.
The second fine motor activity that we pull out for the letter U is based on the word Universe. We have a large floor puzzle of the universe in our classroom (you can find it here). Or you can get one of these wooden puzzles to paint with your child as you talk about the universe!
Common U Words for Preschool and Kindergarten
Here’s some of the common words we like to talk about in preschool that start with the letter U! These words can help with letter sounds and letter recognition as you include them in some of your letter U crafts.
- Umbrella
- Up
- Uncle
- Unicorn
- Under
- Underneath
- Underwater
- Underground
- Unique
- Uniform
- Universe
- Upstairs
- Upset
- Use
- Us
Having Fun with the Letter U
U can be one of the more difficult letters to learn with younger children both because of letter sound and because it’s one of the more uncommon letters of the alphabet. But we hope these ideas will help have fun making crafts and with the letter learning!
