Alphabet Activities

I have been trying to think of ways to engage children in learning letters of the alphabet through play. I wanted to create resources that would be engaging and that children could use by themselves without a teacher.

I have one girl in my class who is passionate about horses, and spends most of her day playing with the dinosaurs pretending they are horses. I wanted to support her alphabet knowledge through making a horse themed A-Z.

I found three pieces of A4 sized matboard, and taped them together using book tape (clear packaging tape would also be fine), along the long edges. The card had been painted with pink paint on one side, which didn't matter.

I wrote the letters of the alphabet, using both capital and lower case letters, on the three pieces of card using a marker pen, making sure to leave enough space for the pictures to fit on. I wanted to make it durable, so I covered the card with clear contact paper. It would still be fine without being covered, and the contact paper does create a glare under light.

The most time consuming part of this project was googling horse breeds from A-Z, and looking for photos of each breed.  I created a document for the photos, resized all the photos, printed it off and laminated them, and used a guillotine to cut out the photos.

I created a pocket at the back to put the pictures in, and put blutac on the back of the photos so they could get matched up to the initial letter.

While I had made this with one girl in mind, there were a number of children who also said they loved horses, and they all took turns looking at the horses and matching them up. (I helped them to identify the breeds until they became familiar with them). I noticed that children were not only matching letters, but also engaging in conversations about the different horses, and sharing what they knew about horses.

This A-Z can be adapted to any theme, and I am currently working on a train themed A-Z for my train enthusiasts.

I created another horse themed literacy resource, where children can match up letters to spell out words, using larger photos of the horses I had used in the A-Z. Underneath each photo I wrote the name of the horse breed.  I also printed out a sheet of letters that spelt out all the words, and laminated them and cut them up. Children then look for the matching letters to complete their word.

I have found that this is a good resource for developing early literacy skills in print, as children try to find letters that are the same, use their observation skills to discern differences, (eg. b and d); and it allows learning to occur about concepts of print such as spaces between words, as well as making sure letters are facing the right way and are not upside down! (directionality).

A very simple resource to make was the alphabet painted on stones.

To go with the stones, which were lower case, I cut sheets of acrylic felt up into rectangles, and used a toothpick and white acrylic paint to write capital letters on.

I went online and looked for an alphabet chart, laminated it and cut the pictures out. Pictures can be matched up with stones and felt letters.

For more teaching resources and ideas, please click on the link here.