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This post has been co-written with Ben Wolfson, a full-time educator and assistant principal in the USA.
A space theme always goes down well with kindergartners. There’s something fascinating about planets, rockets and the idea of aliens somewhere out there that just captures their imagination. It’s even better when you can tie in literacy centers to your theme, and this alphabet maze pack is a great way of helping students master their lowercase and uppercase letter recognition skills while experiencing the thrills of outer space.
Building Letter Recognition
Being able to recognize all 26 letters, both uppercase and lowercase, is a key kindergarten skill as it underpins the whole reading and writing system. The science says that young children require multiple approaches to develop lowercase and uppercase letter recognition, making these letter mazes an essential part of your early literacy centers as they provide at least 10 of each letter in each maze. This repeated practice will help them identify the letters in other situations which you can then tie into the different sounds that each letter makes in different words.
Preparing Space Theme Alphabet Mazes
For this activity you will need:
Paper
Printer
Manipulatives to track the path through the maze like playdough, tokens, mini eraser, etc
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.
The beautiful design of these space theme letter mazes means that you can simply print and laminate a full set and be ready for literacy in under 10 minutes. It’s a good idea to keep the mazes at one per page to allow you to use a variety of media for students to trace the path of letters: making playdough snakes or a series of Lego astronaut figures that follow the route is a great alternative to simply tracing the line with pencils or markers.
Teaching With These Lowercase and Capital Letter Mazes
This space rocket packet can be used quickly straight from the printer – simply give an alphabet maze to your budding astronaut and have them trace through each letter maze using the theme letter. To extend this space theme literacy center, try some of these activities:
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Sort the mazes – being able to recognize uppercase and lowercase versions of every letter is important; however, it’s also important for your students to be able to put the letters into their correct alphabetical orders. You can use these space theme letter mazes to promote alphabetical order by giving students a full set and having them sort the mazes into order. You can make this more challenging by giving a smaller set that requires students to skip letters mentally as they sort the mazes.
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Read the other letters – each alphabet maze provides multiple practice opportunities for each letter, but you can extend these further by having students read the other letters in the maze out loud after they’ve completed the maze. You can also have students challenge each other to find particular letters on each maze.
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Create their own letter maze – once your students have mastered the capital letter and lowercase letter versions of each alphabet maze, you can challenge them to create their own mazes incorporating space rockets, planets, and astronauts along the way. If you really want to up their game, you could challenge them to make mazes that incorporate their sight words or the names of other students in the classroom.
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.
HUGE bundle of no-prep alphabet worksheets!
There are 12 activities for each letter:
1) Alphabet Draw The Scene – Trace the upper and lowercase letters then imagine and draw the rest of the scene. For example, draw what the astronaut sees in space.
2) Letter Detective – Find and color in the boxes with the letter shown.
3) Cut, Sort and Stick –Differentiate upper and lowercase letter and sort them into the correct column.
4) Alphabet Puzzle Fun Sheets – No prep combination worksheets. Trace the letter, find the letter, draw something that begins with the letter and 4-piece puzzles to form the letter.
5) Alphabet Beginning Sounds Coloring Pages – Each letter coloring page comes with at least 6 objects.
6) Dot The Letter – These can be used with dot markers or dot stickers.
7) Q Tip Letters – Use a cotton bud to paint the letter.
8) Alphabet Handwriting – Correct letter writing technique is shown with space to trace upper and lowercase letters.
9) Letter Mazes – Identify the letters correctly to find the end of the maze.
10) Alphabet Playdough Mats – Fine motor strengthening activity to form the letters.
11) Alphabet Punch Cards – Letters are on the edge of the page for single hole punching or using with clips.
12) Alphabet Beginning Sound Clip Cards – 8 different sets included. Match the letter to the object (2 sets each for upper and lowercase) and match the object to the letter (2 sets each for upper and lowercase).
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.
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