In today's guest post, Shelly talks about inventive ways to use our Alphabet Flash Cards for different learning activities with the children, including letter sensory tubs and Alphabet Card I Spy. These pages have been used in the activities below:
We have more Alphabet Flash Cards to choose from here.
Five Ideas for Using Alphabet Flash Cards
By Shelly
One of my favourite items to have in the house when the children were learning their letter sounds was a good set of alphabet cards. I like the ones that have both the lower case letter and upper case letters together so the kids learn it is just a different way of writing them. I don’t tend to use them as traditional flashcards - for example, hold the card up and ask the kids to repeat the letter sound. I preferred using them for other activities. These are my favourite alphabet card activities.
Letter Sensory Tubs
We love sensory tubs and I love combining a sensory tub with a learning activity - like hiding some magnetic letters in the tub and then having the kids dig out the letters to match them to the correct alphabet card. Some ideas for sensory tubs are
- a mixed bean tub using butter beans, red beans, black beans, kidney beans etc. Be careful of adding split peas as these can be a pain to clean up afterwards!
- a beads and button tub using a mix of different size buttons, craft beads, Hamma beads and so on
- a coloured rice tub (dye rice with food colouring and spread it out flat to dry)
- a cereal tub - something like Cheerios or Fruit Loops. This is popular with younger children but you might want to limit how much they eat!
Using our alphabet flash cards in a sensory tub made of mixed beans
Lining up the letters we have matched
Toy Match
Get the children to match as many of their toys as they can to the alphabet cards. You can match toys based on their starting letter or possibly their ending letter. This is a great as it gets the kids moving around the house and my kids always seem to learn better when they are up moving doing something with their bodies.
Matching toys to beginning letters
Alphabet Bean Bag Game
Lay the cards out on the floor and let the kids shout out the letter and then try and throw a bean bag or soft toy onto the correct card. You can always move it up a notch and get kids to jump onto the correct the card once they have thrown the bean bag. My two loved taking it in turns. The one would shout out the letter and then the other have to throw the bean bag onto the correct card.
Enjoying an Alphabet Bean Bag game
Alphabet Card I Spy
This is just a slight alteration to the traditional version of the game. Instead of saying "I spy something beginning with the letter A" the kids would hold up the letter A flash card and say – "I spy something beginning with ..." The other person would then have to read the letter and guess what the object was that they had spotted.
Trace the Letters
I love laminating the flash cards so that the kids can scribble on them with the white board marker pens. But it is also fun to give them tracing paper and letting them trace the letters the old fashion way, feeling the paper under their fingers as they go. They could even try and trace over some of the pictures on the cards.
Tracing over the letters on our Alphabet Flash Cards
This is a guest post from Shelly. Shelly is a home educating parent of two children aged 6 and 9. She blogs at ofamily learning together where she shares ideas on the different learning activities that they do including lots of hand-on Maths, arts and crafts and anything else that is part of their home educating lifestyle.
You can find more guest posts by Shelly, and a list of all our guest posts, here.
