Hands on Letter Recognition Activities

I can not say enough about hands on activities in the classroom when I work with kindergarten students who need a little extra help with letter recognition.  Before we can read we need to know what we are reading and letter recognition plays a big factor in that step. 
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Some of the resources we use in my own classroom are a lot of games and activities that promote letter recognition. 

1.  One of the first things we are going to do this year is add these letter recognition puzzles to our small group time .  I plan on printing them out on cardstock , laminating , and cutting apart the pieces for independent monitoring of students to informally assess their recognition knowledge. 

You can grab the set by clicking on the picture: 

2.  Magnetic letters or Clothespins are always used in my letter recognition activities.  Some of the cards that I typically use during small group work work well with these manipulatives.  The students match the letter on the card and I typically begin using these cards with my little learners who need to start with uppercase letter recognition.  We always begin there before adding lowercase. 

Click on the picture to grab your set:

3.  Finally we work on adding our letter recognition notebooks to the morning work.  I feel it is necessary to keep all of my students on the same page and these pages also work great during guided reading groups.  Students practice writing the letter, identifying them in a short story as we track the words in the story, identify letters in different fonts, and locate pictures that have the beginning letter sound.  I love using these pages with my small groups. 

You can grab them here:

These are just a few of the many things I use with my kindergarten small groups when we are just starting out learning to read.  They are easy enough to print and go and address learners at all stages of their learning.