Matching Sandpaper Letters to Moveable Alphabet

I got side tracked from my language posts that I wrote about here, here and here. I'm hoping to continue them in order to provide a resource for parents who are home-educating. It's best to start reading from the first post as I have sequenced the materials in order. If you have any questions leave me a comment.

Once your child has learnt about 85% of the letters in the alphabet, they're ready to move on. You continue the three period lesson with sandpaper letters, but you also start using the moveable alphabet.

Moveable alphabet presentation 1:

The first presentation of the moveable alphabet is simply a matching exercise. Introduce the child to the moveable alphabet by naming it. Show the child how to place it on a mat and open the box. Next ask the child to get the sandpaper letters and place the box on the mat. Explain to the child that the letters in the moveable alphabet box are the same as the letters they learnt with the sandpaper letters. Ask the child if they can name any familiar letters they see in the box.

Explain to the child that we are going to match the moveable alphabet to the sandpaper letters. Take a sandpaper letter, name it and place it on the mat. Show the child how to run a finger along the moveable alphabet box to search for the letter. It is important to show the child how to correctly search for a letter. If a child doesn't know how to search the box, they may take a very long time to find each letter and get put off the moveable alphabet.

Once the child has found the letter, they place it on the sandpaper letter, matching to see if the letters are the same. They continue in the same way taking a letter from the sandpaper letters and finding the matching letter in the moveable alphabet.

When the child has completed matching the letters, show them how to place the letters back in the box correctly. The child can then put the sandpaper letters back in the box and tidy up the activity.

Moveable alphabet presentation 2:

In this presentation the child is shown how to make words by placing letters next to each other.

The child can choose any word, even if it is not phonetic. The child can then use the moveable alphabet to make the words starting from the beginning letter. If the child completed the I spy games they should be able to break the word down in to individual sounds. It does not matter if the child spells the words incorrectly, this activity is only for seeing how the moveable alphabet is used to make words.

In this example the child wrote, fluwr-flower, letrs-letters and Ali. Once the child has understood the concept of using the moveable alphabet letters to make words, they're then ready to start on a language series.

My next post will be about the language series that I use.