Funny Font Alphabet Sort- (Freebie!)

Hello!  Today I am going to share a fun and easy little activity that I am calling the “Funny Font Alphabet Sort,” and the free downloadable file that goes with it!  The purpose of this activity is to help young children in Preschool, Pre-K, or Kindergarten learn to recognize the letters of the alphabet, even if they are printed in unfamiliar fonts.

This child has known the alphabet for a while, and had no trouble recognizing this letter as a T. However, one of the others kept confusing it with an F, probably due to the curly “tail” on the end. I think that the Funny Font Alphabet Sort is the perfect activity for children that haven’t had much experience with print! But they do need a buddy that can help “check” their work.

Getting used to recognizing letters in different types of print is very important for children, especially since the fonts that are used in classroom materials are not always as child friendly as we might want them to be.  Decorative fonts are getting more and more popular, but they are not always easy for little ones to read!  They can really throw a curve ball at children that are just getting used to what the letters look like.

I tried this activity out with the students that I was working with a few weeks ago when I volunteered at the Shepherd’s Pantry, which is a food bank and resource center for needy families.  My church supports this wonderful organization and helps recruit volunteers to help with their Reading Camp that they hold each summer, and their weekly reading tutoring program during the school year.  Given that the three children that I was working with had finished kindergarten, I expected this to be much too easy.  BOY, was I WRONG!  This was MUCH harder than I expected!  But part of it was that two of the three students apparently didn’t learn the entire alphabet in Kindergarten.

When the children did this activity with me, the first thing that became quite obvious was that we REALLY needed some way for the kids to quickly know which side of the card was UP!  So we stopped and added a line to the bottom of each card.  (I would have done this for you, but the file was created in Microsoft Word, and I’m simply not all that familiar with it!  I usually use Quark Xpress on my Mac.)   Another way to help them would be to chop off the top right corner of each card, etc.

So you’ll have to just add the lines under the letters yourself!  BUT… I uploaded both the pdf file and the editable Word file, so if you know how to put in the lines yourself, you can add them.  (You may have trouble, though, if you do not have all of the same fonts that I have!)

Once we determined which side of each letter was “up,” the rest was relatively easy!  As the children sorted the letters, I continually asked them to tell me what the letter names and sounds were, correcting them as necessary.

If you choose to do this activity, I recommend that you start by showing your students some of the more unusual looking letters.  Let the children help you decide what letter they are first as part of your lesson, and then let them help you sort them.

Below is a video of our Alphabet Action song from HeidiSongs’ Singable Songs for Letters and Sounds DVD.  This is a great song to help kids review all of the letters from A-Z in just three minutes.  I sent home one of these videos with each of the children to help them learn.  I do hope that they are using them!

Here is the ANIMATED version of our Letters and Sounds collection! Check it out!

Since this set has EIGHT examples of each letter, I recommend that you give the children just a few letters to start off with.  My little ones were totally overwhelmed when we tried to do all of the letters at once.  It was just WAY too many!  But I think that they could grow into them.

I hope that you and your little ones enjoy using this resource!  My good friend Janice Lawson typed all of the letters up for me and chose the fonts, so I would like to give her a big shout-out and THANK YOU for making this resource for all of us to share!  (That’s why it was done in Word- because I didn’t make it, LOL!)  It was a wonderful activity for the children at Shepherd’s Pantry, too!

This is what the Alphabet Action song looks like when children do it!  It’s so much fun!

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