ABC upper and lower case matching cards – Printable

Sometimes I like to play simple little games with M.  We print out a grid, or a do-a-dot page, or a magnet page, and I print letters or numbers or whatever we are working on in the spaces.  (You could do it for sight words, simple math equations, colors, shapes… lots of stuff.) 

I’m always stumped though, when it’s letters we are working on, about how to make this into a game, because a game is the best way to get M to participate in just about anything. 
I could just call out a random letter and have him find and stamp it out on his page, but this isn’t very engaging for him and he hasn’t been interested when I’ve approached it that way.  I wanted to find some ABC cards that had separate cards for upper and lowercase letters.  There are a lot out there (and they look great!) that have the upper and lowercase letter on the same card (where you can match up two halves of the same card in a matching game)… but that wasn’t quite what I was looking for.  I want to be able to work on lower case and upper case at the same time… or not… or match a “mama” letter card to a “baby” letter card… or just whatever!

Anyway, here’s what I came up with:

Now when we play our little grid games I just plug in the letters I want to focus on.

Sometimes these are all lower case letters, sometimes they are all upper case, and sometimes they are both!  Then I go through the cards and pull out the ones we’ll be needing.  I shuffle them, M cuts them :), and we take turns drawing one from the top of the deck and then find it on our page.  Whoever gets all their spaces filled in first wins.  It’s a great, fun game, and while M is enjoying himself I know he’s much more likely to retain what he’s learning!  

We also use these to play matching games.  Having the same picture on the big letter and little letter cards is a nice help in being able to match up those mamas and babies. ;)
We’ll use these for other things too… phonic sorts and who knows what else.   I’m open for suggestions too, as always!

If you are interested in printing these for your own use, you can download them here.

Have a beautiful day! :)

The Art Box – Feb. 15, 2010

Somehow I never got around to putting a new art box together for M last week.  I had hopes that he would make more valentines, but I guess he only had one week’s worth of valentines in him.  :) 

He asked for stencils and paint and did, oh, maybe a hundred paintings just like these:

He has this super-ability to fixate on one thing and do it over and over and over again.  And then… again, one more time.  I’m not sure if this is normal;  it may just be he’s picked up a bit of his mom’s craziness.  ;)

I cured him of his stenciling spree by buying him another paint-with-water book.  He did it, the entire book, that afternoon.   So, we didn’t have the artsy-est  week ever, but he really did enjoy himself and I enjoyed the fact that an 89 cent book gave me a half hour of quiet.   

Link up your Art Box posts below!  Remember to link back here in your post so your readers can find art box ideas from other great linker-uppers. :) 

Have a beautiful day! :)