Beginning sounds and letter recognition is one of the first literacy skills kindergarteners are exposed to. I spend a lot of time introducing letters and teaching students how to produce letter sounds, especially at the beginning of the school year, which is why I love incorporating letter identification games into my instruction. I’ll let you in on a little secret… it need to be FUN for them! No one wants drill and kill flashcards and repeating them over and over can get boring quick.

Phonics and Alphabet Centers

Once I have introduced letters and letter sounds to the whole group, I often use small group instruction to offer more independent practice and individualized instruction. One of my favorite activities to use all year long is my Letter and Beginning Sounds Matching Activity. With this activity, students are able to match the lowercase letter to the uppercase letter and find its letter sound.

Directions for Letter Identification Game:

Print, laminate, and cut each letter card out horizontally.
Attach Velcro to the boxes on the letter cards and to the back of the matching pieces.
Students will match each letter to the lowercase letter and beginning sound.

I like to organize all of the lowercase letter pieces in one container and the beginning sound pieces in another. This makes it easier for my students to set up and clean up, as well as differentiate between groups. Some of my groups might still need more practice with letter identification so I would only put out the container with those letter matching cards until they were ready to add in the beginning letter sounds.

Each month I swap out my phonics and alphabet centers for the new seasonal letter identification game. By having seasonal pictures to go with the beginning sounds, it reinforces the literacy skill while adding a new sense of excitement to the activity. The students get used to how the activity works so you don’t waste any time explaining directions each time you swap out the next month’s beginning sounds pieces.

The letter identification games are broken up by month so you can easily purchase one month at a time or get all year long for a discounted rate. Here’s what’s included:

Included: