Moveable Alphabet

I really like the Montessori "movable" alphabet. I refuse to use that spelling, but the concept is solid. These are giant wooden letters which are color coded (blue vowels and red consonants) and used on a mat to let the student begin working with CVC words even before they're capable of writing. They're also pretty fucking expensive. Here's the "small" version on Amazon.

And it's only $59.99!!!

This would be great for The Spawn right now. He's beginning to read. He knows all of his letter sounds and enjoys trying to spell. He writes well but I like to give him a lot of variety when it comes to learning. Enter the moveable alphabet. But since I have such a long Amazon list for this school year, I try to trim the fat wherever possible. Gotta fund the next Disney vacation somehow, eh?

So I spent yesterday evening working on my own version for use with our felt board. Even better, I had all of the supplies on hand already so no need to scavenge for change in the depths of the couch.

I create The Spawn's school materials using fonts from Educational Fontware which includes 33 of the most popular manuscript and cursive font families. A Teacher Pack license is available for $49.95 (academic use only). There are also openware fonts available on sites like dafont.com if you're looking for free font options.

I opened up Publisher and created a document with the alphabet, punctuation, and numbers 0-9 in the manuscript font that I use for all of his alphabet work. I color coded the letters like the Montessori movable alphabet and printed copies on cardstock.

Decorative printer art by The Spawn.

Trimming and laminating came next.

And more trimming...

Finally I had all of them finished. I printed 4 of each consonant and 10 of each vowel in addition to the punctuation and numbers. Then I cut out 154 felt rectangles and glued one onto the back of each laminated tile.

I also put together a tabletop felt board out of an extra 8x10 frame I had lying around for The Spawn to use at his desk.

Success! He loved his new letters.

I'll link any future activities that I come up with to use with the moveable alphabet.