It seems like we spend a lot of time in the kitchen. A lot. And I really enjoy my little kitchen helpers, but if they aren’t helping me with a meal or the dishes, it seems like they have chosen their preferred play spot right under my feet while I am cooking.

So this project was an attempt to give my kiddos another something to do while I’m working on things in the kitchen, and this way they can be next to the fridge instead of underfoot. We spent a morning recently making these wood slice alphabet and number magnets. It’s kind of like the old fashioned neon colored plastic alphabet letters we all probably had growing up. I loved those. I remember playing with them often. I want my kids to have letters around too and grow up loving making words.

This wood slice alphabet magnet project, like other projects I have shared, is ridiculously easy. We like those kind of projects around here.

Here’s the lowdown:

It really is as simple as ONE-TWO-THREE.
ONE: I started with wood slices. I bought them a few months ago at Michaels with a coupon. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them but I really liked them so I brought them home.

TWO: I used some stickers that were in my old scrapbooking stuff. Like I mentioned in my last craft post, I have lots of alphabet stickers. You never know when you’re going to need to do a project that spells something. So I grabbed a sheet of stickers that seemed to fit well with the size of the wood slices. The kids and I stuck a sticker on each wood slice, adding in a few extra for the more popular letters (R, S, T, the vowels, and a few others), and added some for numbers 0-9.

Here’s a tip that I learned the hard way – the stickiness of the stickers was not quite enough for the wood and they started to bubble up after a few days. Not sure if its because my stickers are older or just the nature of the wood. But I ended up having to peel up the stickers and glue down each sticker again. If you make this project, even if you are using stickers too, it wouldn’t hurt to glue them down.

THREE: Add magnets to the back of each wood slice. I bought the magnets at Michael’s too. There was a pack of little square magnets with adhesive on one side so we really just had to peel and stick them on. I had no idea that magnets are a bit spendy (at least more than I thought they would be) so I bought ones that were thin and a decent deal. But what I quickly learned is that I really should have just spent a few more dollars on thicker magnets because these things stick to the fridge but you can bump them off with pretty little effort. Ugh. My advice, buy good magnets. I am pretty sure I will be changing ours out at some point.

Here are a few activities we do with our magnets:

Any other ideas you would use them for? Think you’ll make some too? I’d love to know (hint, hint – leave a comment! I love to hear from you!).

Cheers,
Emily