I have a four-year-old who has been working on learning the alphabet. This pipe cleaner and straw names and letters activity was aimed to help him work on familiarity with the alphabet, recognizing and spelling his name, and fine motor skills.

He also was able to work on his cutting skills, which was his favorite part of the experience. If you are looking for more fun and engaging ideas to teach kids their letters, you’ll want to check out my textured alphabet craft and these great alphabet learning printables.

Pipe Cleaner and Straw Names and Letters

This fun learning activity is perfect for kids aged between preschool and kindergarten. It is great to find fun ways to help them explore their letters and work on their fine motor skills. For more ideas on developing fine motor skills, visit this link with 50+ activities.

For younger kids, like my four-year-old, it will be important to have an adult present to monitor scissor cuts as well as help them manipulate the pipe cleaners into the shapes of letters. This is all part of the learning experience.

Some older or more advanced kids will be able to figure out how to make these letter shapes on their own. Kids can work on learning their names or their entire alphabet. This is an inexpensive activity as well, which makes it accessible in a classroom setting. It would be a fun learning center.

Materials Needed to Make Pipe Cleaner and Straw Names and Letters

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How to Make Letters out of Pipe Cleaners and Straws

Kids will cut straws into smaller pieces.
Next, you will want to create a little twisted ball at the end of a pipe cleaner to act as a stopper so the straws don’t fall off. With some shapes, this will happen more toward the middle or end of letter creation.
Kids will stack straws onto the pipe cleaner. There needs to be some consideration to where joints meet and therefore how many straw pieces to put on at a time.
Kids will help bend, shape and add on pieces to the pipe cleaner to make letters.

Here’s an example of how we pieced together the letter R:

Corban cut all the pieces. He then thread on 8 pieces of straw in the middle. We twisted it into a P shape and twisted the pipe cleaner at the meeting point. He then cut another pipe cleaner to the length of the other leg and twisted that onto the P shape.

Finally, he added straw pieces to both legs of the R and twisted the ends to ensure the pieces stayed on the pipe cleaner. Kids can help problem solve to figure out how to cut and manipulate to make any shape. Parents or teachers can be their to guide and help.

We will do more letters in the future, but today we worked on his name. He had fun mixing up the letters and then putting them in the correct order. We worked on sounds as we went. I hope you have fun learning letters with your own kids with this engaging and inexpensive craft.