alphabet egg puzzles

Today I brought out another awesome resource from Bear’s Words Their Way. . . (2004), but it can be replicated very easily in a number of ways. When super-cranky Cora went down for her nap, Maddy, Owen, and I played this game; it can take as long or as short as you and your little students would like–we played a short version because, after all, Don’t Break The Ice was calling.

• Alphabet Egg Puzzle: The premise of this activity is super-simple, which makes it a favorite of ours. Twenty-six eggs are zig-zagged in half; the top part of the egg has an uppercase letter, and the bottom part has its matching lowercase letter. That’s it. Printed on pink and yellow card stock, ours kind of have a springy feel, so maybe that’s why it was a hit today. This activity is perfect for helping children recognize upper and lowercase letter pairs.

I took the egg halves out of the bag and said, Okay, today we’re going to play a quick game of Alphabet Egg Hunt. All of these eggs have lost their partners, so it’s our job to help them find their friends. Here I have a uppercase letter ‘A’. Let’s search for it’s partner–the lowercase ‘a’. Is this letter or this letter its match? (They were not, so I tried another two.) Hmmm, I just cannot find the lowercase ‘a’. Who can find it?

Maddy found it and reached for the uppercase ‘A’ and checked to see if they fit together. They did, so I said, Awesome! You found it! Let’s try to find letter ‘B’s partner. . .

We did ‘B’ together, then I let them try to find some pairs on their own. They did well, but when I sensed a lull in their hunting, I’d pick up a letter and facilitate the finding of its partner.

After all of the letters had been matched, we put the letters in alphabetical order. This final step is a nice way of wrapping up the game, or you can skip it to save time.

For next time, I might:

• Match all of the letters incorrectly and have them correct them;
• Pull out some confusing letters and focus only on them–p/d/q/b;
• Put all of the uppercase OR lowercase letters in order, then turn the other half of letters upside down and take turns flipping them and putting them with their matches;
• Hide all or half of the letters around the room and have them search for letter matches (this facilitates more activity, of course), then bring their matches to a certain location to put them in order.

Okay, I have to–this was an egg-cellent way of incorporating some letter learning into our day. Any way that we can reinforce alphabet learning is worth setting aside a tiny bit of time for.