These FREE Summer Mapping Mats are a fantastic and FUN way to integrate a summer theme into your word work time!
Find more mats in our Seasonal Mapping Mats Pack.
Need more summer printables? Find all our Summer Learning Printables.
*The FREE download can be found at the END of this post. Scroll down to click on the teal download button.
Summer Mapping Mats
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. This is vital!
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 summer 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.
In this free pack, you’ll find three mapping mats:
1- the sun
2- a bee
3- a popsicle
Using the Summer 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. You can use a seasonal word, like crab, or a different word. {My complete pack has seasonal words included for all the seasons.} The word you call needs to have between two and four phonemes so it will fit in the boxes during Steps 3 and 4.
Note: Just because a word has three letters DOES NOT mean the word has three sounds. For example, bee has THREE letters but only TWO phonemes: /b/-/ee/.
Step 2: The learner repeats the word you’ve called. They then separate/segment and count the sounds in the word. As they do, they drag one counter over to the inside of image on the mat {such as the sun} for each SOUND they hear.
After they have, ask them, “How many sounds are in the word?” {4 sounds in crab}
Step 3: Learners then 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. Be sure you help with this step so that words are spelled correctly. With crab, I would remind learners of the sound of k rules for spelling.
Step 5: It might be tempting, but DON’T SKIP THIS STEP! Ask learners to read the word they just spelled. This step requires learners blend the sounds back together to read the word.
Grab the entire pack in my shop
or keep scrolling for the free mats.
Grab these free mats by clicking below:
Enjoy your summer!
~Becky
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