I'm not entirely sure how this activity came to be, but it's a great one for practicing lower and uppercase letter matching. I do remember that I was talking with my then co-teacher about various ideas for teaching little people, and this general plan emerged from that conversation. My kindergartners really enjoyed playing with these and it makes a great center activity! Materials: round pizza pans, foam uppercase alphabet letter stickers, clothes pins, lowercase alphabet stickers I was able to purchase all of my materials at Dollar Tree, bringing the total cost for each pan to about $3! The actual creation of the project was very easy: I placed the foam letters on the bottom of the pizza pan, facing outwards, around the outer edge. I used a different color for the vowels in order to highlight the fact that these five letters are special. I then placed the letter stickers on the clip end of the clothes pins. All of the clothes pins were divided into zip-lock bags, making for easy distribution and cutting down on the time spent looking for the needed letter. An easy way to increase the "difficulty" of the activity would be to just place all the clothes pins in one huge basket in the middle of the center. This would require students to keep better track of what letters they had done, as well as take away the process-of-elimination method for identifying the more difficult letters. Once at school and ready to use, students simply clip the clothes pins to the edge of the pizza pan so the lowercase letter faces its uppercase match. Many students struggled with the more similar letters (such as p/q and b/d) of course, and there were always a few who got m and w upside down, but they always had a lot of fun turning the pan and talking about the different letters as they made their matches. When not in use, 10 pans and bags of letters fit nicely in a plastic magazine box that I found at Big Lots for about $4. This allows me to slip the whole thing into the closet for easy storage and it's quick to grab when I want to take it to school. Companion Resource: Alphabet Practice Book |
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AuthorI've been teaching since 2000 and love what I do! Archives
May 2018
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