Make Your Own: Cricut Sandpaper Letters

Sandpaper letters are essential Montessori material for the Primary student. The letters give visual and tactile input – auditory too when combined with a teacher or student sounding out the letter.

Today I’m going to show you how to make really fun, better than the original, glitter letters using a Cricut or other cutting machine…because who doesn’t love glitter?

These are fully customizable for cursive, print, numerals in any alphabet.

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First you’ll need a font. Hop on over to my fonts page for links to all kinds FREE of cursive, print, and D’Nealian fonts. Grab the ones you need, install, and come on back!

Open up Design Space. You’ll make one Text layer for each letter of the alphabet. I’ve sized letters to a 430 font size so that they come out nice and big for little hands to hold. You can change the color of each letter if you like. I prefer to make one project file for vowels, and one project file for consonants so that I don’t have to sit there and change all the colors!

Once you have one Text layer for each letter, (it doesn’t matter how they are arranged on your workspace) just hit “Make It” and off you go.

Because it’s super fun, I chose to make my “sandpaper letters” from red and blue glitter cardstock, however you could cut felt, craft foam, or any other material you can use with your cutting machine. Glitter cardstock is a pre-set cut setting. With a Cricut Explore series, you’ll need to set the dial to “Custom” and then choose from the list of materials provided.

Once your letters are cut, they need to be glued to a backing board. We simply used a glue stick to stick two sheets of brown cardstock together, cut the sheets into quarters, and then the same gluestick to glue the glitter letters on top. Cursive letter ‘f’ is the only one that needed a larger cards. ‘M’ and ‘w’ were turned sideways.

Another great option might be to back on sheets of chipboard, cut into quarters. If using a glue stick doesn’t seem strong enough to you (mine have held up just fine for 4 years!) then I love Zig 2-Way glue.

Don’t they look great? So easy, and so enticing.

Check out the “Make Your Own” tag for other DIY materials ideas or visit my store for even more inspiration.