Back to School is the perfect time to practice letter recognition and letter sounds through fun alphabet activities. Studies have shown that multiple repetitions practicing with letters are the key to success when it comes to reading and writing. I have created many fun and engaging activities that are easy to implement in your primary classroom this school year. Take a look at what I have!

A Full Alphabet Curriculum

These fun alphabet activities and centers engage your students in letter recognition. Students will work on letter recognition and letter sounds in many different ways. For each letter, there are five various activities to practice skills.

• Say It, Find It, Read It, Write it – Kids will practice each letter by naming it, finding it on the page, reading it out loud, and writing it down to practice handwriting.
• Letter Display Mat – This mat allows students to practice seeing and forming the letters and identifying words that start with each letter.
• Letter ID through highlighting – Students will highlight the letter each time they see it on the page.
• Letter Naming Fluency – Students will name the letters quickly to improve fluency.
• Letter Writing – Kids will practice writing each letter with neat penmanship.

Access the Alphabet Curriculum and everything it has to offer here! These activities are straightforward to incorporate into your daily lesson plans to help students of all ages with their alphabet skills.

Highlight Each Letter

Let students practice their letter recognition skills using these fun Highlight a Letter worksheets. I like to laminate these sheets so students can use them repeatedly throughout the year. We just use dry erase markers to cross off the letter and erase them when we are done.

These are also great worksheets to send home for extra practice. It’s an easy activity to add to small groups or intervention times. Preschool and kindergarten students will benefit significantly from working with mats like these.

Use a Fun Desk Helper

Some students benefit greatly from using a visual on their desks or table tops. These Editable Desk Helpers are a simple way to scaffold learning for your kiddos. Grab them for FREE from the form at the end of this post!

Include information like shapes, names, addresses, phone numbers, letters, numbers, colors, and more on their sheet. What’s great about these sheets is they can be completely customized to each child. Some students may need more support on theirs, so include whatever you see fit.

These will easily make preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade transitions easier, especially during back-to-school time.

Try a Directed Doodle or Two

A super fun way to practice the letters of the alphabet is to engage students in a directed doodle. I created a doodle page for each alphabet letter so students can see words that start with each letter and draw those objects.

Just have students follow your step-by-step directions to finish each drawing. By the time you finish the whole alphabet, they will have 26 pictures they created on their own! They will find that pretty cool.

Students can create their Directed Doodles on landscape or portrait sheets. Staple them together and they have a fun alphabet book to take home to their family.

Use Environmental Print & Mixed Font

When young children are learning to read, they constantly see environmental print in their lives. They learn to recognize different logos and prints. It’s an easy way to apply their learning to real world scenarios.

My point in saying this is that it’s also important to expose students to multiple fonts. For example, the letter A has multiple formations; when kids recognize them in any form, they will find it easier to read more texts.

This Mixed Font Alphabet is a helpful way to expose kids to many different ways to write each letter. It gives them something new to look at and a variety of repeated exposure! We all know that repeated exposure is the key to reading successfully!

Solve Simple Strip Puzzles Together

Students love piecing together puzzles, especially those they can take home and share with their family members. These Simple Strip Puzzles allow students to practice letter formation by putting together each letter of the alphabet.

Simply print the letters out, cut them into strips using the dotted lines, and let students piece them back together. Laminate them for continued use or have students glue them down onto a larger sheet of construction paper that they can keep. Once they finish all 26 letters, they will have a collection of puzzles to show off.

These puzzles are great because they practice letter recognition and formation skills, hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills, and sequencing. What’s not to love?

These fun alphabet activities will engage your students and help them with their letter recognition skills this school year. Have fun using them with your preschool, kindergarten, and first-grade students! Happy back to school!