Sunday 23 January 2011

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.


5 comments:

maddy said...

Your blog is very much innovative and much helpful.
Letters

Elle Belles Bows said...

Thanks so much for sharing the ideas to supplement the sandpaper letters. Very helpful! Kerri

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

This is great blog and I want to add that using flash cards to to children really help them to learn and groom.
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Unknown said...

can you tell me the name of the drawer cabinet that is holding the objects? thanks