Alphabet Patterns

I have a beginning reader who is so excited to have started school and be learning to read!

He’s also a super laid back kid, and kinda vague, and while he’s keen, there are a few gaps in his knowledge that are making learning to read a little frustrating right now. So we are capitalizing on the excitement while we can, and working on some of the things he’s finding difficult in his reading journey.

One of those things is letters.

While Noah can recognise, label, and write most of the letters, and he’s pretty good at identifying the sounds they make, there are a handful of letters that he just can’t remember. We look at a printed alphabet page together almost every night but no matter how many times we go over it, the information is just not sinking in, so it’s time to get hands on.

One of his favourite hands on letter learning tasks is making alphabet patterns.

I’ve created a set of simple letter pages that have both the upper and lowercase letter on each page. They are useful for all kinds of activities, but we love ‘loose parts’ at our house so our favourite activity is following the lines of the letters and making patterns.

You can use any kind of small items you have. We used cut up drinking straws, small wooden dots (from our Speilgaben set), little animal erasers (that we got from The Reject Shop if you are in Australia), and some plastic and glass gems (which came from our local dollar store).

Because we are working on reading skills (and some speech and language practice too) I ask Noah to name the letter he is working on, then I ask him what sound that letter makes, and if he knows a word that starts with that letter.

If it’s a letter he is struggling with I’ll help him get those three things straight and then I encourage him to say them each time he adds an item to the letter – “L /l/ like!” “P /p/ pot!”

You can download the full set of alphabet pages here.

This printable letter set is an A4 sized pdf file, you will need a pdf reader such as adobe acrobat to open it. If you are printing on US ‘letter sized’ paper be sure to select ‘fit’ or ‘shrink to fit’ from your printer options.

Please remember that the printables at picklebums.com are for personal use only, you may not sell, share, or link directly to these files.

If you need some more information about what ‘loose parts’ are, or some ideas of items to collect, read this article on loose parts play.

The alphabet pages are useful for lots of other hands on letter learning activities too.

We’ve also used them for a simple tracing/writing activity with highlighter pens to write over the top of the letters. Or you could laminate them and use dry erase markers.

And we put them into the bottom of a sand tray for tracing/writing with your fingers for lots of sensory and tactile input.