Activities & Days Out / 18 August, 2019 / Nanny Anita

Learn Your ABC’s with Letter Sorting

Playing games based on the alphabet is a great way to help young children learn their ABC. For this particular game, children don’t need to know their letter sounds; it is all about sorting them based on how they look. Using different sensory experience can really help children start to identify and remember what a letter looks like.

There are plenty of different categories that you can use for this game, but I just happened to use curvy or straight to sort the letters out.

You will need:

• 3 pieces of paper
• Letters – we used some wooden letters taken from a Melissa and Doug set, but magnetic   ones or even letters written on paper and cut out would work.

Write curvy, straight or both onto the paper – you want one category on one piece of paper.

Then let your little one sort the letters out by feeling and seeing if the letter has a curvy or straight part or both.

I did this with YC, who knows her letter sounds, so when she was picking them out of the bag she naturally said what each one was before sorting it into the correct group.  She did need some prompting to begin with, but by the end she really got the hang of it.  I asked her at the end if she found it easy, to which she replied yes but that she did enjoy it.

Maybe for older children you could try blind folding them and getting them to try and guess what the letter is by the way it feels!

This activity may help development of:

• Letter recognition

Picking out her letters

Using her sense of touch to figure out which category it goes in.

Sorted