Letter Recognition Flowers

We’re embarking on learning more and more letters and I wanted to create a reusable activity that I could pull out and use for reinforcement exercises with the new letter sets and blends when needed without having to explain how to do it or get creative first and spend more time creating an activity than sitting down to do it. So for this weeks #playfulpreschool theme of flowers T and I set about creating a reusable summer flower garden which with her we are going to be using initially to help with letter recognition and sorting but I’ve also used it with my first grader to work on addition and subtraction and I can see me being able to use it time and time again.

Materials Needed

Large Sheet of White Paper (we used some from our easel roll!)
Blue wax crayon
Green Paper
Yellow Paper
Coloured Paper for Flower Petals
Laminating pouches & Laminator – OR Contact Paper
Scissors
Dry Erase Marker

Glue or Double-sided sticky tape.

Learning Objectives

• Recognise and sort letters

Preparation

I like involving T with the preparation if I can and this was a great opportunity to do so. We started off by creating the sky – after removing the paper from around a wax crayon she turned it on its side and coloured in all over the white paper.

We then used the green paper and she cut out some grass to go along the bottom of the paper randomly going up and down to produce spikes of longer and shorter grass.

To get the flower heads and the sun in the sky we used a bowl and drew around it and then cut out the circles. For the sun, she snipped around the outside – a good skill turning with one hand and snipping with the other hand working on coordinating so that you don’t end up with some of the parts cut out.

I then drew out 10 petals per flower head and set 4 of the flower heads and the petals through the laminator and then cut them out. Glue the grass in place along the bottom of the paper add some stems of strips of green paper and attach the flower heads to the top.

Letter Recognition Flowers

Decide on the letters that you want to work on – 4 at a time is a good number as they start to learn the letters. We settled on s, a, t, p the first 4 letters that are taught in the UK and two that I knew she recognised easily the s and the a and the t which she recognised in upper but not lower case and introduced the letter p. In the centre of the flower heads write a letter.

With the petals I mixed up the colours and wrote the same letter on 10 different coloured petals and repeated with the next letter and then the other two letters – so I ended up with 10 sets of s, a, t and p.

We then sat down together and reviewed the letters in the centre of the flower heads, then as we choose a petal which letter was on it and matched it to the respective flower.

When you have finished wipe down the letters and it can be reused again for another letter set or to reinforce the same letters on a different occasion.

Extension

As I mentioned I have also used this with my older child, instead of simple letter recognition in the flower heads I wrote a number between 1 and 20 and then on the petals I wrote a number of different ways to work out that number using addition and subtraction to make those numbers.

I have also used it with word families reading the word as we put the petals down around the flower head and with T to order the numbers 1 to 10 around each flower head using petals of the same colour.

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