Here’s another preschool dinosaur activity to help your children to learn to read. This one’s a cute dinosaur letter matching game that you can use to help them to recognize and match upper and lower case letters.
Most of my learning to read printables so far have focused on lower case letters as these are the ones they will come across most frequently when reading. However, it is also important for them to be able to recognize upper case letters as well – I mean, there’s at least one in every sentence…
This game will provide a great way for your children to start associating the sounds they have previously learnt with the upper case letters as well.
This pack contains 26 pairs of dinosaur egg bottom and top halves – one for every letter of the alphabet.
What Skills Can Your Little Ones Learn And Develop?
This dinosaur letter matching game is designed to help your children practice and develop their early reading skills, such as:
- Letter recognition – knowing what the written form (grapheme) of the sounds look like and being able to match upper and lower case letters
If you try some of the activities I mention below your children can also have a go at:
- Sounding out – this is saying the different sounds that the written letters make, one sound at a time
- Blending – the ability to put the different sounds of a word together to be able to correctly say the word
- Segmenting – this is being able to breakdown and hear the different sounds a word is made up of
These are important skills taught during phonics lessons and help your children take some of their first steps on the path to becoming fluent readers.
RELATED If you’d like to discover an easy to follow phonics lesson you can do at home check out this post!
How To Prepare This Dinosaur Letter Matching Game
Firstly, download it by clicking on the download box at the bottom of this page.
After that, you’ll need to carefully cut them out (or roughly if you’re that kind of person…).
There’s 52 parts included in total.
That’s quite a lot of cutting so you may just want to do them for the current phonics sets your children are learning.
Then I’d advise laminating them to keep them nice so you can reuse them.
That’s it, your little ones are now ready to start matching their upper and lower case letters.
How To Use This Dinosaur Letter Matching Game
This sweet letter matching game would be a great activity to include as part of a phonics lesson you can do you self at home. Here’s a few ways you can use the cards (I’m sure you’d be able to think up some more as well).
Letter Case Matching Game
One activity you could do is to lay some of the dinosaur eggs on the floor. If your children are learning phonics set 1 then you could put down the ‘P’, ‘A’, ‘S’ and ‘T’ top egg halves. Then give them the ‘a’ bottom half and see if they can match the letters to put the egg together correctly.
When they get really confident, you could put down all the upper and lower case cards and see if they can move them all into the correct matching pairs.
Blending Activity
You could lay the dinosaur eggs out to spell easy CVC (consonant, vowel consonant) words like ‘cat’ or ‘dog’ and see if they can sound out and blend them correctly to read the word.
Check out this post about phonics lessons at home to see how to do this correctly.
Sound Sorting Game
You could also use them as the base of a sound sorting game. Choose a few eggs, let’s say A, S and T and put those on the floor. Then get a range of objects that begin with those sounds (sock, apple, toothbrush etc.) and see if your little ones can place the correct objects under the correct eggs.
You could always time this as they get better and mix up the cards and objects as they learn new sounds.
Find The Sounds
This is a segmenting and spelling game.
You lay out a selection of eggs, tell them an easy CVC word and they have to find and arrange the sounds in that word to spell it correctly.
For example, you could say the word ‘cat’ and lay out the ‘c’,’a’ and ‘t’ as well as a few other eggs (muddled up so it’s not too obvious) – start with just a few extra letters and then increase the number as they get more confident.
Your little ones then have to segment (breakdown) the word ‘cat’ into the sounds they can hear so ‘c’ then ‘a’ then ‘t’ (you may need to help them out a bit here).
They then need to use their letter recognition skills to find the correct letters and lay them out to correctly spell the word.
Letter Matching Memory Game
You could challenge your little ones even further by playing a memory game with them.
I’m sure you know how to play this game (sometimes called pairs), but in case you don’t it’s pretty easy:
- First, shuffle all the bottom halves together (you might want to just do a set or two to start with) and put them in one pile and all the tops together in another
- Then lay them all face down in neat rows with separate areas for the tops and bottoms
- Starting with the youngest player, take turns turning two cards over (one from the tops and one from the bottoms)
- If the upper and lower case letters match, you can keep them and have another go. If they don’t your turn is over and play moves to the the next player.
- Play continues in this fashion until the last pair is collected
- Count up all cards (a good chance to get a bit of counting practice in) and whoever has the most wins!
This game is great for developing memory and concentration skills.
I hope you like this alphabet matching game printable!
