Letter / Alphabet Identification Activities

Alphabet and Word Recognition Activity   Write your child's name on a sentence strip.  Read his/her name and say each letter in the name.  Remember to point to each letter as you say its letter name.  Provide your child with several magnetic letters.  Have your child find the matching magnetic letter for each printed letter in his/her name.  Place each magnetic letter over each printed letter in the correct order.  Next print known words: daddy, mommy... and repeat above steps. 

Timed Letter Identification Activity   As your child becomes familiar with reciting the alphabet, have your child practice letter recognition.  Begin by choosing 2 letters that are visually very different in shape such as t and s.  Next, draw two circles on a white board.  Write one of the letters above each circle.  Provide several of the chosen letters for your child to sort.  Scatter the letters below the circles.  Have your child say the letter names as he/she sorts them into the appropriate circles.  To increase difficulty, extend the activity to include three or four circles with three or four visually different shaped letters such as t, s, b and n

Materials Needed: A Sorting Mat - In the video example a magnetic slant board is used.

Letter Sorting Fun - Large Silicon Muffins Cups are also fabulous for sorting letters!

They are flexible, sturdy, soft and easy to clean.  In this activity we used colorful cardboard, foam, and plastic letters of different sizes. We also used upper and lower case letters.

A variety of upper and lower case letters

How many letters in the word?   Print familiar words on the word cards (child's name, cat, sat, dog... Have your child choose a word card.  Read the word card with him/her.  Next, have your child choose the correct letters and place them in the correct order to make the word.  In this activity your child will  learn that letters need to be placed in the correct order to make a word.

Example with the word card/name Erick

Fill in the Missing Uppercase Letters - Just because a child can recite the alphabet doesn’t mean she/he knows the letters.  All too often, children believe the letters - l, m, n, o, and p - are one letter.  To help your child learn her/his letters, have your child practice identifying the missing letters in the charts below.

Fill  in the Missing Lowercase letters