Letter of the Week Activities (and Montessori Letter Introduction)

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through my link but does not change your price.

We recently started doing a letter of the week in our home with my nearly 3-year-old. I have gotten so many requests for what we do and how we structure it so I wanted to share some activities along with how we are doing letter activities in general.

I planned to start this back in the fall when my son was around 2.5. For a couple of reasons, this didn’t work. One, we had a really busy fall with a lot of guests. Second, I don’t believe he was really interested at the time. If you are teaching your child at home one of the best parts of it is you really can teach at your child’s exact sensitive period (and with the tools that really resonate with them, which I will get into). At 2.5 my son was asking about letters a lot. We had been playing phonological awareness games for several months and he could isolate first sounds. However, when it came to actually putting the sounds with the written letters in letter-of-the-week activities, he just wasn’t too interested. We took a giant step back and returned several months later. When we did return to it he was very ready. In fact, at this point, I feel letter of the week is going a bit slow for him, especially since he seems to have picked up a lot of letters without explicit instruction, so this week we switched to two a week. We will see how it goes. At the point we started again, he knew quite a few letters, understood they had names and sounds, and would point out the letters he knew. He was also gravitating towards alphabet books a lot. In seeing my son absorbing letters my husband said this really let him fully understand sensitive periods. He is right. My son is deeply in the sensitive period for learning letters now and it makes doing it fun and easy. With home learning, there really is no rush to teach this at 2. I found waiting until intense interest made it much more fun.

We are introducing letter names and sounds as well as both upper and lowercase together. This is supported by recent research (by the way, this book is awesome going into that!). Back in the fall, I planned to just do lowercase. If you are only doing one, I would recommend lowercase which is how Montessori education traditionally teaches letters. However, I have found doing both together has been really easy. I feel with my son (and not at all saying this applies to all children!), if he wasn’t able to handle both together, he probably just wasn’t ready at all. He can identify which is lowercase and which is uppercase and even understands that after a period comes uppercase. This was not something I planned on teaching but when we were making A crackers we ended up with dots and I used the moment to teach about periods. The same goes for letter names and letter sounds. In Montessori, letter sounds are introduced first. We have had no issue introducing both together. He understands that the letter has both a name and a sound. If we are talking about a word he can isolate what sound the word starts with and then if he knows the letter he will say what letter it is that makes that sound. Of course, every child is different. That said, I was skeptical about the approach of introducing everything together and it has worked very well. And, again, it is what is supported by modern research.

There is a lot of debate around the best order to introduce. We are doing one of the orders often recommended in Montessori, the order from the book How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way with some tweaks to fit my preference and his interests. The Montessori letter introduction order we are (mostly) using is here:

First set: c  m  a  t 

Second set: s  r  i  p

Third set: b  f  o  g 

Fourth set: h  j  u  l

Fifth set: d  w  e  n

Sixth set: k  q  v  x  y  z 

Some recommend using your child’s name first. My son’s name starts with a Y and has some sounds in it that are not aligned with English pronunciation along with a lot of letters pretty low on that introduction list. This is a great method if your child’s name is something like Sam, but you can probably guess why we are skipping that method! Others recommend doing alphabet order. It really is up to you and I don’t really think it matters all that much. What does matter more is making sure you know the sounds that each letter makes! This can be found on YouTube, etc. For example, Aa is apple and astronaut but I would not use acorn.

Oh, one more thing. Montessori traditionally starts with cursive. You can decide whether that makes sense to you. Personally, it doesn’t for me. I want my son to recognize as much of the print he sees in everyday life as possible and that means a focus on print.

Now I am going to share some of the activities we do for letter of the week! I want to stress that these are activities that work for our family. I hope they inspire you but, more importantly, I hope they help you think about what would work well for your child. A commonly recommended letter of the week activity, for example, is playdough mats. I know my son will have absolutely zero interest in that. One way I found to have him form the letters is using o-cereal. We rarely have this in our home so this is a fun food for him and he enjoys getting to eat it after forming the letters.

Sandpaper Letters: We start each week with an introduction to the letter of the week. I will show my son our sandpaper letter for the letter and tell him the name and sound. I invite him to trace it which he has become more interested in doing over time. I then ask if he can think of any words that start with that sound. Together we brainstorm some words that start with the letter. I bring out miniatures of some words with the letter. So, for example, for Aa I had a mini apple and a mini alligator. For Mm we had a mini monkey, mouse, moose, mushroom, etc. We have used these in the past for sound sorts as well, sorting first sounds.

Letter Baskets: the sandpaper letters and the little figurines then go into a basket together for the week. This is just a way for him to return to the figurines and sandpaper letters throughout the week to be reminded of some words starting with that sound. Bringing it out at the beginning of the week is really helpful for introducing the letters.

Find the Letter: I use a laminated sheet with a bunch of the letters amongst other letters for him to find the letter and mark it with a dry-erase marker. He loves using dry-erase markers so this is a fun activity for him. I found a sheet on Canva searching alphabet activity (they have TONS of free resources on Canva for alphabet, by the way). I customized it by changing the font. My goal is for my son to recognize the letters in different fonts. He searches for the letters and marks them. This is generally done at the beginning of the week. He finds it easy but it is a great way for him to start noticing the letter and picking it out amongst others.

Sound Sort: This can be done using figurines as I discussed above or just photos of different items. Here we sort into the sound and not the sound. So, for example, with Mm, he is sorting moon, mouse, and mittens as Mm and horse, vase, and nest as not Mm. The one we are using here came from Project Based Primary.

Cheerio Letter Formation: I give my son a picture of the letter in upper and lowercase and he makes the shape with Cheerios. We don’t eat Cheerios much so he finds this a fun activity. You can do it with other foods (I thought of doing freeze-dried mango for M week for example) or with pompoms or any other mini object without the eating part.

Letter cookies or crackers: We make crackers regularly so often this is as easy as just using some of the dough to make them in the shape of the letters. If we don’t need more crackers we make simple cookies or something else that can be made into that shape. This is a fun way to have more exposure to the letter throughout the week as he eats. We have an uppercase and a lowercase set. My only complaint is the lowercase ones are bigger, but that is what it is.

Sound collage: I threw these together on Canva. It is simply a letter in the middle and a whole bunch of pictures of words starting with the letter for him to cut out and paste on. I have a feeling these will likely grow boring to him at some point, but for now, we are doing them as part of the letter of the week.

Tracing Tiles: We have these tracing tiles my son uses to trace the letter. Our focus right now is NOT on forming the letters. The hand is still developing until around 6 so we do not focus on having my son write letters. However, this is a way for him to trace the letters and develop those pathways.

Sand/salt tray: This is another way to work on forming the letters without pressure on writing them. We found ours at the dollar spot at Target a few years ago. This is not of much interest to my son, but it can be a great option for many children.

Magnatile letters: This likely requires some help, but you can make letters with Magnatiles. Another option to allow your child more independent involvement is to trace them on a whiteboard or a light table and let your child fill in with them. These would be so fun on a light table! These are our favorite magnetic tiles.

Themed foods: We make an effort each week to highlight some foods that start with the letter of the week. For example, we made morning glory muffins for M. We also use meals as a time to think about what we are eating that starts with the letter of the week, such as the mushrooms on our pizza!

Build a letter magnets: We got these magnets for him to build letters. As I mentioned, I like finding opportunities for him to create the letters without actually having to write. These are fun for that and he can do them in the kitchen on our fridge which is really the center of our home. We started with me building letters and him identifying them and then me starting letters and having him finish them.

Sound Sort with Multiple Letters: This isn’t exactly a letter of the week activity, but I do recommend it if you are doing letter of the week. This allows you to reinforce previously introduced letters and also work on distinguishing between tricker ones (s and c has been a sort we have been working on, for example). I find the Safari Ltd Toobs to be the best for the small figurines for this. The idea is sorting by initial sounds.