by AJ has always been motivated by letters. He loves being able to point to a letter and tell you what it is. He thinks it’s fun when you tell him what letter to find and he finds it. He’s learned to identify most letters by their phonetic sounds — he has a little trouble with things like M and N and the short vs long sounds for some of the vowels, but really — sometimes I struggle with those too. He’s even started to show interest in making the letter sounds himself when he’s wearing his speaking valve — his favorite letter sound thus far is P, for Peppa, despite me trying to push M for mom.
When it comes to AJ’s learning and therapies, you kind of have to follow his lead a little. If he’s not interested in an activity, he can be quite stubborn. I’ll leave you to guess which parent that comes from…… And when he gets bored or feels like he’s not being challenged, he starts to either refuse to participate, or he will intentionally answer things incorrectly.
So once AJ started getting bored with pointing at and naming letters and his interest in phonics started to fade a little too, we knew we had to start to move on to putting words together. We tried a few commercially bought word puzzles, but his interest in them has been questionable, in part because he doesn’t have the fine motor skills to put them together. without help.
But he has loved flashcards for as long as I can remember, so I made him a set of flashcards, and then after chatting with our OT a bit, also made him a laminated card to use for matching words. Because the cards are smaller and a little slick from being laminated, it’s also a bonus fine motor activity.
The fun thing about this is there’s more than one way to use it.
- You can match cards to cards on the templates.
- You can match dry erase marker to cards on the templates.
- You can use cards and have kids write with dry erase marker on the templates.
- You can both use dry erase markers on the templates.
- You can play matching games with the cards.
- You can spell with the cards without the templates.
- You can practice putting the letter cards in ABC order.
- You can match upper case letters to lower case letters.
- And more!
Right now AJ’s biggest struggle with it has been learning left-to-right progression, so we’re going to mark the first square with a sticker or a dry erase arrow so he knows to start there. (You can hear his OT talking about that in the videos even!)
If you’d like to print your own set of cards, we’ve made them available as a free download.
And of course we made a few extra things available to download too – because we know that AJ will grow into using it more, and that other kiddos may have different needs, so all of the following are available at the same download link!
You can snag all of these below (links all go to the same place, but we wanted to make sure there was a list of them all for you!). When I was printing these for AJ I did print two sets of the letters so that I had enough for both him and I to work with.
- Free Download: 1 letter matching templates
- Free Download: 2 letter word matching templates
- Free Download: 3 letter word matching templates
- Free Download: 4 letter word matching templates
- Free Download: Uppercase Flashcards
- Free Download: Lowercase Flashcards
If you don’t own a laminator and want to snag one, you can snag one like the one I have on Target and Amazon – and as a bonus — it’s less than $25! Note that these are affiliate links and we receive a commission if you purchase these items!
If you download and use these cards or use something similar with your kiddo, we’d love to see pictures or hear about how they’ve worked for you!
