letter recognition

  • Preschool letter activity

    Easy Alphabet Match Activity

    I posted September’s Month of Preschool pack last week and wanted to share a sample activity with you! This has been one of my favorite easy activities for years because it is so low prep and can be used so many different ways. Print and laminate these and offer a variety of different letter manipulatives that children can match (alphabet pasta, cereal, pretzels, small letter magnets, erasers, or paper cut-outs). Laminated mats can also be written on with dry erase marker, or you can print one for each child that they can write on in pencil or marker. Go download your copy here, and make sure to check out the…

  • It’s Wednesday, and here at Preschool Ponderings, that means time to focus on the standards.  Every Wednesday I choose an Early Learning Standard and share a number of activities that can be aligned with that particular standard.  Remember, the Standards that I use every day, and am most comfortable with are Ohio’s Early Learning Development Standards – you can review them here, however I’ve found that even if your State’s standards differ, many of these activities can still be aligned similarly. I’ve rounded up some great ideas today!Domain: Language and LiteracyStrand: ReadingTopic: Letter and Word recognition This standard is the one most people think of when they consider language and literacy…

  • Friday Freebie – Environmental Print

    Happy Friday! I’m so glad that February is almost over, bring on spring! Unfortunately, just because the calendar says March, that doesn’t mean it’ll be warm here. It’s supposed to be 36 degrees this weekend, and that sounds warm to me right now! This week I’ve spent a lot of time sharing ideas for letter recognition and alphabet activities, so today’s freebie, fits right in.  I’ve used this Environmental Print Alphabet set in my classroom for a couple of years, and the students love it. They recognize the brand names, and are easily able to figure out the letter that each brand name starts with.  Go download this freebie from…

  • Alphabet book keepsakes

    I’ve started thinking about our annual preschool graduation, and I have a couple of different ideas up my sleeve, but one thing that I always like to incorporate is a keepsake that shows how much the children have learned.  This year my kiddos are going to create alphabet books with their own illustrations for each letter.  We started working on them last week, doing a couple of letters whenever we get a chance. So far they are absolutely adorable.  They are really putting a lot of effort into their books, and some of the illustrations that they have come up with are hilarious. When they get stuck I pull out…

  • A new alphabet activity

    I’m not sure if you have ever used these, but I am in love with alphabet pasta! It is cheap, and super versatile. With our toddlers we would use it to explore textures, introducing it raw the first day so that they could feel the rough, bumpy, tiny little letters, and then cooking it for the second day to see how they reacted to the slimy, and sometimes sticky texture – it was mesmerizing. Now that we have older children we have spent a lot of time focusing on letter recognition, and this was an obvious choice for a number of different activities. We did a letter hunt (can you…

  • Name Recognition and Large Motor…Together!

    This was a new activity for our class and it was such a huge success that we did it every day this week, so I absolutely had to share it with you! Each child got a balloon with their name written on one side, and their first initial on the other side. The children were told that they could do anything that they wanted with their balloon – they just had one rule to follow: They could not use someone else’s balloon. This meant that they had to recognize their name so that they were not accidentally taking someone else’s balloon as they played. The children threw their balloons, hit…

  • New Year, New games

    After using all of my wonderful games and materials all last semester, they aren’t looking so wonderful anymore. I know that if I feel this way about them, the kids must be too, so it’s time to find some new things. One of my favorite new finds is a game called POP! The one pictured above is for sight words, but it is also available in a letter recognition/beginning sounds version. Each child draws a “kernel” when the choose their kernel they have to say what letter is on it – for more advanced children they have to give the sound that the letter makes. If they are correct then…