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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
There’s nothing that preschoolers love more than a good game of hide and seek. Your classroom doesn’t offer many opportunities for this with their bodies, but these adorable printable alphabet games will satisfy their urges to track down hidden objects. Each page has both uppercase and lowercase letters and a cute hippo who needs help to find the letter using a unifix cube. Be sure to have multiple sets ready as your students learn the alphabet and find a new favorite game!
Early Literacy and Letter Recognition
The entire preschool literacy program is dedicated to helping students learn the alphabet and a foundational piece of this is being able to identify both upper and lower case instances of each letter. There are a wide variety of early literacy programs that teach the sounds and names of each letter differently, but these printable alphabet games will fit with whatever program you’re using as there’s one page for each letter. You can print them all at once and then use them in the suggested order in your early literacy centers.
Preparing Hippo Letter Recognition Mats
For this activity you will need:
Paper
Printer
Unifix cubes or other colored tokens
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.
These fun printable alphabet games make for an excellent no-prep literacy center. Just download the letter that you’re working on this week and print multiple copies. If you’re looking to create a blank template for students to fill, simply print a random page and put white stickers over the letters in the grid and next to each unifix cube. When you make copies, it will come out as a blank template for your students.
Extending The Hippo Fun
Your students will love playing these letter recognition games, and you’ll see them reaching for a unifix cube set every time you tell them it’s time for literacy centers. This repeated game play will have them mastering their uppercase and lowercase letters in no time, so while you’re waiting for everyone to catch up, try some of these extension tasks:
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Play 2 boards – to truly develop their skills, play find the letter but give each pair of students two boards to play on. For an added challenge, pick boards that share the same letters (e.g. the ‘a’ and ‘b’ mats are both covered with a’s and b’s).
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Speed covering – all preschoolers like the challenge of doing a familiar skill quickly. Once they’ve mastered a particular letter by playing the printable alphabet games, have them time themselves to cover up all the upper and lower case letters. You could even have a leaderboard for the quickest times.
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Create their own mats – one of the biggest drivers for letter recognition in the preschool classroom is to help students transition those skills to their writing. Challenge your more confident students to create their own version of the hippo letter recognition mats by giving them a blank template and having them write the upper and lower case letters of their choice. Not only is this great writing practice but they will be eager to play this new game with their friends.
This game is also available as digital Boom Cards which can be used with Seesaw, Google Classroom and other distance learning platforms. Grab these Internet task cards here.
Like this? Then you’ll love my 10 Zoo Themed Literacy and Math Centers. These easy-prep games will get your students working on math, literacy and fine motor skills.
Games included:
1) Feed the Giraffe Counting Mat to 20 – Pick a number card and feed the giraffe that any leaves. Use real leaves, playdough pretend leaves, or green pom poms.
2) How Many Animals Write the Room – Students will go around the classroom visiting the “zoo”. When they spot the animals, they will need to count how many there are and write down the number from 1-10 on the recording sheet provided.
3) Zoo Animal Number Puzzle Strips – 5 different types included (1-10, 11-20, skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s).
4) Arrange by Size – Each animal has 4 different sizes for them to arrange from smallest to biggest or biggest to smallest.
5) Shadow Matching Cards – Look at the animal shown and choose from 3 given shadow options.
6) Zoo Animal Alphabet Strips – Work on handwriting and animal vocabulary at the same time. Each lined strip shows the correct capital letter formation plus an animal that starts with that letter.
7) Syllable Count – Students will look at the labeled animal shown and clap out how many syllables are in its name. Use a paperclip, clothespin or wooden peg to mark the answer.
8) Hippo Alphabet Find and Cover – This activity works on letter recognition for both uppercase and lowercase letters.
9) Animal Alphabetical Order – A-Z animal cards are placed inside a brown paper bag or box “cage”. Students will need to pick out 3 cards randomly and arrange them in alphabetical order on the mat.
10) Short Vowel Sloth – Fill in the missing vowel in the CVC words.
Check it out for more ready-to-go fun!
Fun Books About Animals:
Other Animal Printables You’ll Love:
1) Zoo Animal Sight Words Bingo – Use this as a small group literacy center in your classroom to learn pre-primer Dolch sight words.
2) Zoo Animal Number Puzzle Strips – Learn to sequence numbers with these cute puzzles.
3) Farm Animal Find and Cover Letters – Work on letter recognition any time of the year.
4) Count the Chickens – practice counting from 1 to 10 with these clip cards.
5) Bird Theme 3-Part Cards – learn different types of birds in this Montessori-style activity.
6) Rainbow Chameleon Color Sorting – laminate these mats and use them to sort color pompoms.
7) Mr. Alligator’s Shape Bubble Hunt – Spin the wheel then color in a matching shape.
8) Unicorn Ten Frame Mats – make math a little more magical while teaching one-to-one correspondence, counting, and the use of ten frames.
9) Dog Bone Math Game – Count up the bones and solve the simple sums within 10.
10) Animal Alphabet Follow the Letter – 26 pages to learn uppercase letter recognition.
Educational Tools For Your Classroom:
Browse My Most Popular Literacy Activites:
1) Valentines Alphabet Clip Strips – Kids will choose among 5 different letters on the strip to identify the matching ones.
2) Alphabet Beginning Sound Coloring Pages – Watch your child become more familiar with each letter of the alphabet as they practice coloring in the objects with that beginning sound.
3) Tommy Turkey’s Alphabet Pie – This turkey-themed letter recognition activity is so simple to prep and makes a great file folder game!
4) Pirate Alphabet Playdough Mats – Just print out the playing mats and ask your child to form the letters out using the playdough provided.
5) Farm Alphabet Find and Cover Letters – Work on letter recognition any time of the year!
6) Werewolf Spin and Cover – Kids will race to find all the letters on their mat this Halloween.
7) Bunny Burrows Game – Fun game for small groups or circle time where students will catch a bunny and say out the sound.
8) Letter-saurus Fossil Digging – Dinosaur lovers will enjoy being a pretend paleontologist and finding all the letters.
9) Alphabet Handwriting Worksheets – Practice lowercase and capital letters with these print-and-go pages.
10) Rainy Day Alphabet – 1 printable, many ways to use.
