Phonics. It begins with letter sounds and developmentally speaking, the beginning letter sound is typically what kids hear and recognize first {pun intended}. You can see this in kids’ invented spellings of words. A word such as bed might only be spelled B. Car may only be C. This is completely normal and part of spelling and literacy development.
Beginning letter sound matching games, like the one we’re sharing today, are a great way to get kids listening for and recognizing those sounds. I’m wrapping up our 2nd annual LEGO Week with some DUPLO Beginning Letter Sound Matching {with a FREE printable at the end.}
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DUPLO Beginning Letter Sound Matching
I prepared our DUPLO bricks for this activity the same exact way that I did for our DUPLO Rhyming Word Matching earlier this week, except I put letters on one side and pictures on the other side {many of these letter pictures are the same ones found in Learning the Alphabet, ABC printable packs for learning letters and their sounds.
I pulled apart the matches and set the letters in one group and the pictures in another. I only started with 6 pairs at first. And I started with letters in my daughter’s name and letters that she knew better.
It didn’t take but a second for her to realize that like our DUPLO Rhyming Word Matching, the colors also matched. She began matching them based on color alone. We {including my mom, who was helping her} encouraged her to stop and listen to make sure the letter sound matched each picture.
While she knows most all her letter names, she only knows a handful of letter sounds at 3 years, 2 months; so this activity was more for modeling and hands-on fun with letter sounds than making sure she has mastered her letter sounds.
Later in the day, I mixed up some of the pictures and letters to make it so the beginning letter sound matches weren’t color coordinated. She wasn’t so sure about this. First, she did this, absolutely convinced she had them matched correctly.
I showed her that the colors didn’t match up anymore, that we’d have to listen for the letter sound at the beginning of each word. She was willing to match a few like this, but then told me it wasn’t right and tried changing them all back. Seems she has a touch of Type A personality, like her mama. 🙂
More Ideas You May Enjoy:
- Learning the Alphabet, printable ABC packs
- Counting Syllables with LEGO Blocks
- 18 Ways to Use LEGOs to Teach Literacy
- Alphabet Sounds Learning App features FOUR LEVELS of interactive play for alphabet sounds and more! It’s an app that will definitely GROW with your preschooler.
Follow This Reading Mama’s board ABC Goodies on Pinterest.
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Enjoy Teaching!
~Becky
Thank you so much for these ideas. My 3 and 5 year old (and even the almost 7 year old) enjoyed the rhyming duplo blocks game. My only problem with the beginning letters/sounds one is the use of “quarter” for “q” since it doesn’t have the normal “kwa” sound for “qu”, but sounds like “k”. My little ones get that confused with the “c” and “k”. Other than that, we love this idea!
That’s interesting. So you pronounce quarter with just a /k/ sound and not the /kwa/ sound? Where do you live? And to address the c and k, it probably works best not to use them in the same game. 🙂
This makes me laugh. I’ve never used a picture of a quarter to link with the /q/ sound, probably because I grew up on the West Coast and pronounce it “korter.” But my mom, who grew up in Rhode Island, says “kwatuh.” Fascinating! 🙂
We all pronounce things so differently, don’t we?