Little Hands-on ABC’s and 123’s ~ Letter Sort

This letter sort “game,” as Juliette referred to it was a big hit.  Sorting the letters is a great way to talk about the letters and the sounds that they make while focusing on the shape of each letter and how it looks. 

To set up the activity I picked a few letters to focus on, in this example we were working with the first five letters of the alphabet.  Then I went to my bin of Magnetic Letters and took out all the letters we were going to work with and placed them in a little basket.  Then I wrote each letter on a piece of colored construction paper to create letter mats for Juliette to sort the Magnetic Letters onto.

 

Juliette picked a letter from the basket

 

Then she showed it to me and told me the name of the letter.  We sang the letter song from the Letter Factory DVD to practice the sounds. 

(The A says “ah",” The A says “ah,” every letter makes a sound the A says “Ah”)

Finally, she placed the letter on the matching letter mat and continued by picking a new letter.  Juliette was excited to see all of the magnetic letters filling up the mats!

If you do not have a huge collection of magnetic letters look around your house for other letters that you can use.  I noticed we have foam letter puzzles, letter flash cards, scrabble pieces, foam bath letters, letter cookie cutters and even letter stickers would work.

Little Hands-on ABC’s and 123’s is a bi-monthly feature that focuses on practical and simple ideas that you can do at home to help your tot develop their letter and number skills.