Printable Turkey Uppercase and Lowercase Letter Matching Game (Thanksgiving Literacy Center)

There’s a new turkey in town, and he’s missing a couple of tail feathers. Luckily, the ones he’s lost all have letters on them! Can your little ones help him out by matching them up?

Ths turkey letter matching game is a great way to help to teach the upper and lowercase letters this Thanksgiving.

A lot of our early reading printables focus on lowercase 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 uppercase letters as well – I mean, there’s at least one in every sentence…

This fall letter matching game will provide a great way for your children to start associating the sounds they have previously learnt with the uppercase letters as well.

This pack contains 26 pairs of feather letters – one for every letter of the alphabet as well as the turkey base sheet to place them on.

If your kiddos enjoyed our pumpkin letter matching game, this one keeps the fun going right through to Thanksgiving.

What Skills Can Your Little Ones Learn And Develop?

This 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 (letters) of the sounds look like and being able to match upper and lowercase letters

If you line the feathers up to spell some simple CVC words – e.g cat, 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.

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.

How To Prepare This Thanksgiving Letter Matching Game

First you need to download it by clicking on the download box at the bottom of the page.

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After that, you’ll need to carefully cut them out (or roughly if you’re that kind of person…).

There’s 52 cards included in total.

Then I’d advise laminating them to keep them nice so you can reuse them.

Ans then there’s the turkey base sheet which you can leave as is or cut out if you have the time.

That’s it, your little ones are now ready to start matching their upper and lowercase letters.

How To Use This Letter Matching Game

This alphabet matching game would be a great activity to include as part of a phonics lesson you can do yourself 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).

The Great Feather Hunt

Hide the lowercase feathers around the room (or the yard, if the weather’s kind) and leave the uppercase ones in a pile next to the turkey. Your little learners find a feather, race it back, place it on the tail and then hunt out its uppercase partner. Great for a bit of energy burning and gross motor practice!

Make it Sensory

Bury the feathers in a tub of dried corn kernels, split peas, shredded orange/red paper or orange-dyed rice, with the turkey base sheet sitting beside the bin. Little ones dig out a feather, say the letter and its sound, then look for its partner. It turns a matching game into a proper invitation to play, just keep an eye on the smallest learners around the dried fillers and use something you know they will be ok with.

Roll, Match and Trace

Once the matching is going well, pick out five or six feathers your little learner found tricky and pop those letters into our roll and trace worksheet generator. They roll the die, trace the matching letter and get a bit of letter formation practice with exactly the letters they need.

Blending Activity

You could lay the cards 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.

Sound Sorting Game

You could also use them as the base of a sound sorting game. Choose a few letter cards, 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 cards.

You could always time this as they get better and mix up the cards and objects as they learn new sounds.

Letter Matching Memory Game

You could challenge your little learners 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 uppercase cards together (you might want to just do a set or two to start with) and put them in one pile and all the lowercase together in another
• Then lay them all face down in neat rows with separate areas for the upper and lowercase letters
• Starting with the youngest player, take turns turning two cards over (one from each area)
• If the upper and lowercase 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.

However you use this turkey letter matching game, I hope you and your little ones have a good time with it! And you can find more Thanksgiving printables here.

Enjoy and let’s nurture those neurons!