There are various ways that Montessorians teach sandpaper letters. Some choose to start each child off with the first letter of her/his name, while others begin with the letter 'a'. Teachers may keep all of the sandpaper letters together in one container, but very often teachers will separate the letters into groups. There are a myriad of ways to create letter groupings, but here are the groups that have work best for me:
Group One (Color Coded: Red) - m, s, a, t, b, h
Group Two (Color Coded: Yellow) - c, o, r, f, d
Group Three (Color Coded: Green) - g, i, l, n, p
Group Four (Color Coded: Blue) - e, k, v, x, z
Group Five (Color Coded: Purple) - j, q, u, w, y
I find that these are grouped by letters that are easiest to say and form first and moving down towards letters that are more complicated to say and form. With each group of letters, I create the following activities:
Initial Sound Sorting
Ending Sound Sorting
Middle Sound Sorting
Movable Alphabet Picture Cards
3-Part Cards
For the Middle Sound Sorting, with each new group, a new set of vowel sounds is added. So for the Red Group, there is just 'a', the Yellow Group has words with 'a' and 'o', and so forth until the Purple Group that has all five vowel sounds.
For the Movable Alphabet Picture Cards, I include only CVC words that use the letters in that group and prior groups. The Red Group has only CVC words that can be built with the letters m, s, a, t, b, and h. The Yellow Group contains CVC words that use all of the Red Group letters plus c, o, r, f, and d. This continue in the same fashion throughout the letter groupings. The same is true with the 3-Part Cards.
If you are looking to create a new system to teach Sandpaper Letters and the lessons that follow, give this a try!
