Autumn Mapping Mats

These Autumn Mapping Mats are a fantastic and FUN way to integrate a fall theme into your word work time!

Find all our Free Printable Fall Activities.

*The FREE download can be found at the END of this post. Scroll down to click on the teal download button.

Have you ever heard of phoneme-grapheme mapping? It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. All we’re doing is getting kids to connect letter sounds (phoneme) with the actual letter (grapheme) to read and spell words.

If you’re curious to get a deeper understanding into why this is important for our learners, I highly encourage you to visit these posts:

I have three FREE autumn mapping mats you can download to help your learners build meaningful relationships between letters and letter sounds to spell and read words. These are just a few of the mats you’ll find in my Seasonal Mapping Mats Pack.

Using the Autumn Mapping Mats

Before you start, each learner will need a mapping mat and four small counters. You could use math counters or even dried beans.

Step 1. Call a word out to your learners. I could be a seasonal word, like bat, or a different word. {My complete pack has seasonal words included!} The word you call needs to have between two and four phonemes so it will fit in the boxes during Step 4.

That DOES NOT mean the word can only have two, three, or four letters. Sheep, for example, has FIVE letters, but only THREE phonemes: /sh/-/ee//p/.

Step 2: The learner repeats the word you called, then separates/segments and counts the sounds in the word. As they do, they drag one counter over to the image on the mat {in the image above, it’s a leaf} for each SOUND they hear. Ask, “How many sounds are in the word?”

Step 3: Learners drag the counters down that represent the sounds into the boxes below.

Step 4: Starting with the first sound in the word, encourage learners to remove the counter and then write the letter(s) that represent each sound until they have spelled the entire word.

Step 5: DON’T SKIP THIS STEP! Ask learners to read the word they just spelled.

Grab the entire pack in my shop
or keep scrolling for the free mats.