Letter Matching Activity



This is an activity that I adapted from the Rock Phonics activity that was created by Mr. Smith at TeacherTipster.com. If you have not seen his videos you need to check them out. He has a ton of really great songs and ideas. Plus, he is absolutely hilarious.

In his activity Mr. Smith wrote letters and word chunks on accent gems (the kind you use in flower arrangements) to use as word making manipulatives. I love this idea for a word making activity, and plan on doing that a little later in the year.

I adapted this activity so that I could also use it at the start of  kindergarten, when we are working on letter identification. I was in the Dollar Tree and found  bags of large and small gems. I thought that they would be perfect for an activity to match capital and small letters, because I could use the big gems for the capital letters and the small gems for the small letters.

I typed up a sheet of capital letters and a sheet of small letters. Mr. Smith wrote his letters on the back with a Sharpie. This works well with an overhead. I'm not going to be using these on an overhead, so I just typed the letters. If you write them with a Sharpie remember to write them backwards, so they show up correctly when you flip them over.

Letters for Gem Activity
(Note: There are some formatting errors that occured when I uploaded this document to Scribd, but it will still work)
After printing the sheets I cut out each row. I used a regular Elmer's glue stick on the back of the gems.  This seems to have worked well, but I had to make sure I rubbed the glue with a paper towel until it turned clear. I placed the gems over the letters and cut around the outside. Before I use them I will use Modge Podge to seal the papers onto the gems.

I'm going to place these in a literacy center. I plan on using these as a letter matching activity, and am also thinking about using them in a letter ordering activity. I think that my students will be really excited about using the gems. Thanks for the inspiration Mr. Smith!



Note: The camera and lighting caused a glare in some of the photoa, but they are easy to read in person.