Roll a letter phonemic awareness game {101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet}

The next installment in my 101 Ways to Teach the Alphabet Series is a simple game that helps develop children’s phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness refers to an ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds of language. One part of developing phonemic awareness is learning to identify the first sound of words. For example, kids need to recognize that fork starts with the /f/ sound and sun starts with the /s/ sound.

This Roll a Letter activity gives children practice matching sounds to letters. The way we play also adds a gross motor component, which is always helpful for my active kids who love to move while they learn.

This activity is appropriate as a review after children have already begun learning the sounds made by several letters.

In this case, I selected six letters that my daughter was familiar with. I printed them on small cards and inserted the cards into the sides of our differentiated instruction cubes to make a letter dice just for her.

I then found pictures online of objects beginning with the letters found in her cube.

I helped her spread the pictures on the floor. Then I invited her to roll the dice. (She loves any excuse to throw things and chase them down while she is learning!)

After throwing the dice, she identified the sound made by the letter, and then selected a picture beginning with that sound.

As she matched sounds to pictures, she set the pictures aside. She continued rolling the dice until she had matched sounds to all of the pictures.

The great thing about using the differentiated instruction cubes is that you can change the letters depending on which ones your child is learning.

(They can also be used in lots of other learning activities as well. See how we used them to learn about the four cardinal directions of north, south, east, and west.)

More ways to teach to the alphabet

More alphabet posts from Gift of Curiosity:

• Letter hunt sensory bin
• Making letters with straws and play dough
• I spy letter hunt
• Spaghetti letters
• Montessori sandpaper letters
• Making “alphabet soup”
• Smash the puffy letters
• Kinetic sand letters
• Letter hopscotch
• Crystallized letters
• Letter hop
• Letter tic-tac-toe
• Rainbow letters

You can find more ways to teach the alphabet on my Literacy Activities for Kids page and my Letter Learning Pinterest board.