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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
These cute flower alphabet sound mats will fit beautifully with your outdoor theme and give your students plenty of practice when they’re learning the alphabet. There’s nothing like spring in the preschool classroom. As winter draws to an end, your students will get to spend more time outside and the days begin to get warmer and longer. It’s also a great time to talk about plants and flowers in your classroom, which gives you the perfect post Easter theme.
Teaching Letter Sounds With Pictures
Mastering the alphabet with both letter names and sounds is an essential skill for your students to master before they start big school. Any preschool letter activity has to teach students that each letter has a sound (or two!) that it makes as its name, and these are always easiest to hear at the start of words. These free alphabet printables show a wide range of common objects and students will delight as they find all the possible letter sounds helping them with learning the alphabet.
Preparing Alphabet Sound Mats
For this activity you will need:
Paper
Printer
Tokens to mark the objects that begin with that letter like mini erasers
Optional: laminator
If you don’t have the materials needed, don’t sweat! You can get it delivered to your doorstep really quickly with Amazon Prime. You can get a 30-day free trial here.
Differentiated Activities For Alphabet Sound Mats
The best thing about these free alphabet printables is that they come ready to use straight off the printer. Just print a full set in either color or black and white and your new favorite preschool letter activity is ready to go. However, all teachers know that each kid will access the same activity differently, so try some of these differentiation tasks to help your students succeed:
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Limited numbers – as you’re introducing each letter sound, you may want to have students find a limited number of pictures that start with that sound. While there are at least six on each page, you could start by having them identify two to “pass” the activity. As they come back to each letter, simply ask them to find one or two more from the last time. When they can identify all the images (and explain how they know that they’ve found all the images), you know they’ve mastered the sound.
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Name all the pictures – knowing that you’ve found all the possible solutions is a great logical tool that not all preschoolers learn through math. You can give them extra practice with these alphabet sound mats by having them identify all the images out loud. They can then put a check or an x over each image to show that they’ve tested them all.
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Spelling guesses – for those students who appear confident with their beginning letter sounds, you should challenge them to write out some of the words that start with the target letter. You can help them sound out the words to see what other sounds they can hear, and it will act as a good check in on their literacy development.