Boy, am I excited to share these Fine Motor Alphabet Mats with you today!
These are a FANTASTIC way to help kids build those fine motor skills needed for gripping a pencil. Not only that, there’s a phonics component hidden on each mat.
Have you seen our Fine Motor Number Mats?
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**The free download can be found towards the END of this post. Just click on the teal download button.
Fine Motor Alphabet Mats
In this free pack, you’ll find 27 uppercase mats and 27 lowercase mats. {There are two included for the letter x; one for the initial position and one for the final position.}
Each mat shows the letter and then shows a place to START the letter {a great introduction to letter formation!!}. In this circle is an image of something that begins with the featured letter, which is a integrates some phonics, too!
Ideas for Using the Fine Motor Alphabet Mats
There are SO many ideas for using these mats. I thought I’d share images of just a few of them with you.
Be sure and encourage your learners to grip small objects with their pointer finger and thumb when adding them to the mats.
Learners can:
- Use tweezers and pom-poms to cover the mats.
- Use playdough – Roll playdough into balls and cover, learners could also flatten down the balls afterwards.
- Cover with buttons.
- Cover with math manipulatives, like dice.
- Use mini erasers to cover each circle.
- Cover with bottle caps.
- Cover with coins.
- Use Power Magnets to cover each circle.
- Use manipulatives that relate to each letter. See all our suggestions with our Alphabet Grid Games.
Now, you may have some learners who just LOVE dot markers. And that’s fine. Just have your learners use dot paint to dot the circles. Once it’s dried, learners could cover their colorful mats in the hands-on ways mentioned above.
Enjoy teaching!
~Becky
In all my years of teaching alphabet sounds I’ve never understood why an egg is consistently used to illustrate the initial short /e/ sound despite the fact that it’s a long /a/ sound we hear when we say the word ‘egg’. Do you have any explanation? I’ve heard the argument that words like elephant or elevator are too confusing to children since it is actually an /l/ sound they would initially hear with these words, but, honestly, what makes egg any better choice? Just curious to know what you think.
It all depends on where you’re from. I’ve always pronounced it /eg/, starting with the short e sound, not the long a. It actually wasn’t until just recently that a reader told me that she pronounced it with the long a. It all depends on where you’re from. Because the other reader started hers with the long a sound, she said her district had them use an image of a bed or something with the short e sounds in the MIDDLE of the word to represent the short e sound.
Just curious where you are from? I live in southern Calif. and I pronounce it as /eg/ as well. It took me a minute to figure out why you had a problem with the photo of an egg for the short sound of /e/. If it is regional, it would be interesting to see where and how everyone pronounces the word.
I’m in NC.
Hi, I’m from the Caribbean and we also sound it with /eg/. Short letter sound . Same as the word elephant and elevator.