Working With The Sandpaper Letters

A while ago I posted about the sandpaper letters and explained how one should introduce them to a child. There are many activities you can do along side the sandpaper letters to provide a child with further practice, here are a few that I do with my children and a free download:

1. Matching objects by beginning letters.

This is by far the favourite activity that children enjoy. The child takes a basket of carefully prepared objects and matches them to the correct letters.

If you have a class of children you can store the objects in drawers as in the photograph below. If your homeschooling you can simple prepare a basket for your child and change the objects regularly.

2. Sand tray: I have a post about it here.

3. Matching pictures by beginning letter. These cards are used in a similar way to the objects mentioned above. I have uploaded the file for these cards to my material store and can be downloaded for free from here.

4. Fill in the letter craft activity. This isn't strictly a Montessori activity, but I did use it in my class at one stage. The child can take a letter sheet and decorate or colour the inside of the letter. I found that parents liked to see this activity and some creative children enjoyed it.

5. Make your own letter book: I don't have a picture of this, but its a lovely activity. The child will go through a selection of carefully selected catalogues and choose pictures to cut out that begin with the letter they are learning. The child will then stick these letters in a book. The end product will be a 26paged letter book that contains many pictures for each letter. Some children like this, but only a few actually complete the a book with the whole alphabet.

There are many many activities you can do, if you have a good Montessori compatible activity that can be done while the child is learning with the sandpaper letters, blog about it and link back to this post [or leave a comment]. It will be lovely to see what other people are doing.