This squirrel and acorn letter matching game is a great way to help to teach the upper and lowercase letters.
Most of our early reading printables focus on lowercase letters as these are the ones your children 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 lowercase squirrel letter cards and 26 uppercase acorn cards to match with.
You can check out more fun fall activities here!
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 cards 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.
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 Squirrel and Acorn 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.
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).
Letter Matching Game
One activity you could do is to lay some of the uppercase acorns cards on the floor. If your children are learning phonics set 1 then you could put down the ‘P’, ‘A’, ‘S’ and ‘T’ cards. Then give them the ‘a’ squirrel and see if they can match it correctly.
You could also put down all the upper and lowercase cards and see if they can move them all into the correct matching pairs.
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 correctly.
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.
I hope you and your little ones enjoy this fall letter matching game.
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