The holiday season is an exciting time of year for our youngest learners.
Students enjoy helping to decorate our classroom and we talk about how they celebrate the season at home.
They get their creative juices flowing when they make these cute Fork Painted Christmas Trees and build their names using Christmas trees. And the holidays would not be complete without playing our Christmas Bingo.
Want more bingo? Get bingo throughout the year with our Seasons Bingo Bundle.
Because activities with a seasonal theme are a great way to get kids learning without realizing they’re learning.
So to connect the holidays with literacy we’ve created this Christmas Initial Sound Match-up. This way our students can learn sounds and phonemes at the beginning of words in an enjoyable hands-on way!
Want more Christmas literacy and math activities? Be sure to take a look at our Christmas Match-up Bundle.
Christmas Initial Sound Match-Up
Learning letter names and letter sounds themselves is the beginning stage of phonics awareness.
When students say and hear the sound of letters, it helps them to discriminate the difference in letters. This is an important building block in the development of their early literacy skills.
This resource is perfect for helping our early readers build up their phonological awareness. This Christmas themed match-up is ideal for Preschool and Kindergarten classrooms.
It works well for literacy stations, independent work, or in small review groups. Depending on your students’ abilities, this can be used as a challenge or as a review.
Inside You’ll Find:
- 26 sheets of Christmas trees with each letter in the alphabet.
- 26 sheets with bulbs, each with 6 different pictures in 3 different colors,
- Another set of 26 sheets with bulbs, with 6 different pictures on each sheet in the same color to make this less of a challenge.
- This resource also comes in black and white to save on ink, so it comes with 130 pages total.
Getting the Christmas Initial Sound Match-Up Ready
This printable is easy to prep. After you purchase the match-up and download it, you’ll print (color or black and white) and cut using a paper trimmer. Place all your pieces in a plastic container. I love using plastic pencil cases to store centers like these. It keeps everything in one place and does not take up a ton of space.
You can see how I keep my Language Arts materials organized throughout the year.
I recommend printing these out on cardstock and laminating them before you cut them so you can easily use them year after year.
Using the Christmas Initial Sound Match-Up
Students will start the activity by choosing a tree with a letter on it. This student chose the tree with the letter “Ss.”
They will then sort through all of the bulb pieces with pictures looking for the ones that start with the sound /s/. You may want to have students work in small groups the first time they try to complete the Christmas Initial Sound Match-Up.
Once the tree is filled with the bulbs representing the corresponding letter, they can move on to a new letter and start again.
This activity can also be completed by having all the trees laid out on a table or the floor. Students will then sort through all of the bulbs and place each one on the correct tree.
If you have younger students or students who need extra review or practice, you can differentiate this activity. Use the bulb sheets that are only in one color for their corresponding sounds. This will help them to distinguish the corresponding letters easier.
Another way you can simplify this activity is to provide them with two of the trees and the corresponding bulbs at one time.
Once they master those, you can gradually add in more trees and more bulbs.
Whether students are working together as a group or showing off their mastery of sounds on their own, they will have a jolly good time.
Download this Christmas Initial Sound Match-Up Now!
Are you ready to implement this in your classroom or home?
Get it here on A Dab of Glue Will Do
Get it here in our Teachers Pay Teachers Store
Your kids can practice initial sounds all year long with our Initial Sounds Mega Bundle. It has 12 themed initial sound activities! Plus, when you purchase them together, you’ll save yourself some money!
Have fun with your students in the classroom and at home with this Christmas Initial Sound Match-Up Printable Activity.
Want More Christmas Learning Ideas?
Don’t forget to check out all of the other Christmas Learning Resources we have for your classroom!
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