Sandpaper Letters and Moveable Alphabet: How we Started Montessori at Home

My son began showing an interest in letters at age 2. Not knowing what I was doing, I began by teaching him the names of the upper case letters through play (here's an example of an old post). He learned quickly and wanted more ... and I realized I had no idea what to do next. I began searching online for fun ideas to play off of his interest and that's when I discovered Montessori.

 

Once I learned about the Montessori process for teaching letters, I didn't care if my son forgot every uppercase letter I had just taught him ...

 

(My son, age 3 after building his first words on his own with the moveable alphabet)

 

I started by purchasing sandpaper letters:

In Montessori education, letters are introduced by phonetic sounds rather than letter names. They’re also introduced in an order that allows the child to make many words with the letters they've learned. Here's the order we followed:

 

s  m  t  a  p  f  c

r  b  l  i  g  n  d

h  j  k  w  o  u  v

y  z  x  q  e

 

We would trace the sandpaper letters, then write the letters in a sand tray with our fingers. As soon as my son learned the first row of letters, he began reading Bob Books as they seemed to follow the order listed above.

After learning all the phonetic sounds with the lowercase letters, our next step was to purchase the moveable alphabet. We've been working with this material for almost 1 year ... and here we are now: 

(recently turned 4)

 

This weekend, my son helped plant our vegetable garden and wanted to write about it in his journal.

 I wrote the first sentence in his journal, "Last weekend, I went shopping for vegetable plants and helped Mom and Dad plant ....." My son then built "a gordin" and wrote it in his journal.

 

Here's another journal entry he was writing about a bubble show he was going to see. I helped him with bubble (the double "b", and the silent "e"). He did the rest on his own.

 

At 4 years old, spelling is not as important as his developing interest in writing :)

  

How this method has been helping my daughter:

Thankfully, I was able to begin this method with my daughter as soon as she began showing an interest in letters. She started around 17 months, and this picture was taken at 24 months:

Here she's matching the moveable alphabet to the sandpaper letters, saying the sounds as she moves from letter to letter.

 

She is moving through this differently than my son because of her age. She wasn't ready for reading Bob Books, but she was starting to show an interest in beginning sounds. Here I tried to upload a video of her at 24 months matching beginning letter sounds to pictures, but it didn't work too well:

 

 

This work is something she takes off of the shelf on a daily basis. She really enjoys playing with these letters, her animals and cards for matching. I love how this is school work, but it is also some of her daily play.

 

I'm hoping to share a little every week on our Montessori journey. Please note that we are not purists, and I'm not pretending to be an expert ... I just want to share our journey with hope to inspire others.