Letter Recognition

When I took over in preschool I knew that I was going to need to teach the kids to recognize all the letter of that alphabet.  I had been working on it sort of in the Toddler room but not really expecting much of it to stick.  Well now I needed it to stick. I was going to have to do more then have a letter of the week that we talk about at circle time.

I was scanning through Pinterest, as I always do, looking for fun ways for the kids to play with their alphabet.  I found that several teachers will use clothes pins with the letters on them to work on matching letters.  Here is one example of that:
http://trainupachildlearnaswego.blogspot.com/2012/09/5-diy-manipulatives-for-preschool-and.html 

I took this idea and made a few centers that related to themes we were discussing.

 These are the first letter matching set I made for my class. I cut out the dinos from old file folders and used them to match upper case letters to their lower case counterpart. I had several kids super excited to play with these.  Some kids I had to really encourage to try. But I feel they worked really well.

These I made for Valentines week.  I had the laminated hearts all ready from previous years so it was pretty easy to add letters to the hearts.  I have to say that these were not as liked as the Dinos but I still had a few kids show interest in them.

I used the same set of clothes pins for both matching sets.  I plan to do more matching sets when the inspiration hits.  Right now I am focusing a bit more on Number recognition and counting.  We are having a lot of fun with that.