My New Alphabet Card for Writing

When I noticed my previous alphabet cards looking a little worn and tatty, I decided to make a new card that fits the needs of my children better.

We use an alphabet card during our writing time. The children have one each. On one side of the card are the letters of the alphabet and a picture associated with that letter. Because I teach phonics using Jolly Phonics, the picture is of the action or image that the children learn for that letter. For example 'a' is a picture of an ant, because of the sound 'a' makes in ant. On the reverse I had a list of commonly used sight words.

My new cards follow the same format, alphabet on one side and sight words on the other. But they are a little prettier!

As well as the letters of the alphabet, I have included the digraphs (two letters that make one sound) that we have been learning, and coloured each row of the alphabet card a different colour. That way I can tell children who are having difficulty locating a particular sound what colour the letter is they need to look for. "You said /a/, /a/ is in the red row." I also had just enough space to fit a little visual reminder about saying the word, listening to the sound, and writing it down. Something we are currently working very hard at achieving independently. (Because I like a hook on my 'y' and a loop on my 'k' I had to play around with a mixture of fonts to get the letters looking how I like to teach them.)  

On the reverse of the alphabet card are 5 boxes of sight words. Each box has a different colour border. That way I can tell the children to look for a word in the blue box or the yellow box. They may not be able to read all of the words, but they may be able to guess with just a little hint at what box to look in. 

In my classroom I have some of the sight words that we use the most in our writing written on little bees that are attached to the wall with sticky velcro. I call these words our 'busy bee' words and if the children need to write them I encourage the children to remove the the word from the wall so they can copy it into their writing book. On my new alphabet card the 'busy bee' words are in a box with a picture of a bee. This gives the children the opportunity to use the alphabet card to copy the 'busy bee' word or find and pull the word straight off the wall.

Click here for a free download of my new alphabet card. 

UPDATED: Click here for an updated version with a 'kiwi' handwriting font.