Letter Links

This morning I made up a game for the kids using some wooden disks and clothes pins inspired by an idea I saw on pinterest. (I would provide you with a link to it but I’m not quite that tech savvy yet.) The original post called for clothes pins and flash cards but I decided to use these wooden disks instead. I love the classic look of the game.

The disks were a donation from a game that one of our daycare families no longer use. We’ve had them for a couple of years and the kids brought them back to life by sorting, counting, building or dropping in them into containers. It was hard to sacrifice the open ended magic of these guys by defining a use for them but I have a feeling this game will be around for a while so it’s worth it.  

The set up was simple: I wrote each letter of the alphabet on the disks then a matching letter on the clothes pins to create a matching game. 

At first I just set the disks and pins on a tray and left it out for the kids to work with, my only instructions were to keep all the pieces at the table so we could find them when we were done. The kids just went to work building trains and stacking towers of disks so I pointed out that the pins and disks had matching letters. The kids got to work putting the matches together but after a while the two year olds gave up. I noticed that while all the children were looking for letters the oldest (3 year old) was the only one with the ability to scan all the pins long enough to find the correct match.

 I decided to make it a little easier by lining up the pins on one side and the disks on the other. Once everything was lined up the kids were much more successful and interested in matching the letters. 

Here Sam is telling Logan how to find the correct match “It has to go down then a bump for the letter D, that’s how you know you got the right one.”

Love it when the kids help each other out!

The surest way to get the boys involved in a literacy project is to add some kind of building element to it, these guys stayed until the whole tray was matched up. After we play the game a few more times I will add lower case letters to the other side of the disks.