Letters and Sounds Learning Centre

Create an inviting space for children to play, learn and practice their knowledge of letters and sounds by setting up a Letters and Sounds Learning Centre.

A Letters and Sounds Learning Centre is a space or area of the classroom that children can visit continuously throughout the day and engage with the resources and activities available.

One of the activities you can be set up is matching alphabet letters with alphabet pictures to support learning about letter-sound correspondence.  The Printable Alphabet Picture and Letter Cards for matching activities is a great tactile resource for children to manipulate and play with at the Letters and Sound Learning Centre.  Children can engage in matching tactile alphabet letters and objects.

What you will need?

As teachers we collect many resources over the years for our classrooms and you will find that you will have many items for a Letters and Sounds Learning Centre.

You will need the Alphabet Picture and Letter Cards, tactile alphabet letters, objects or toys that begin with A-Z sounds, alphabet books, alphabet puzzles.

The ideas are endless as to what you can add to the Letters and Sounds Learning Centre and you can incorporate other items such as clip boards with paper, pencils, Alphabet Tracing Mats, alphabet posters and other items that your students are familiar with or have been using as part of their letters and sounds learning.

The learning centre can also include several alphabet resources such as alphabet books, alphabet puzzles, letter tracing mats, wooden letters, small toys or objects to match the Alphabet Letter and Picture Cards.  Explicitly model to students how to use the Alphabet Learning Centre and how to complete the different activities available.

Let’s Play

Using the Alphabet Picture Cards, children can match alphabet letters by placing the letter on top of the card, next to the picture.

Some tactile educational resources that you may have to use include, alphabet stones, wooden letters, magnetic letters, felt letters and alphabet beads.

If you do not have alphabet letters available, you can make some alphabet stones and bottle tops by drawing lowercase letters on with a sharpie.  You may be able to take wooden alphabet letters out of a puzzle and incorporate this into the matching activity.

Let’s Play

Using the Alphabet Letter Cards, children can match small toys and objects that begin with the same letter sound to match the letter on the card.

Children say out loud what the object is and hear the beginning sound of that word. Then match it to the letter that makes that beginning sounds, for example /h/ for house and /k/ for kite.

For tactile objects or toys that begin with the letter sound, a great place to start is in the animal figurines box. Puzzle pieces are great for this as well. There are so many animals that begin with the beginning sound in the alphabet, and these are also small to manipulate and place on the letter cards.

Let’s Learn

By playing with the Moveable Alphabet, children are mastering some important skills such as:

• Concepts of the alphabetic principle
• Letter-sound knowledge: Phoneme – Grapheme Correspondence
• Isolating beginning sounds: hearing it and locating an object or letter that makes that sound.
• Consolidate and reinforce letter-sound knowledge (previously taught)

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