Alphabet Book with Mother Goose Time Letter Tools

We are getting to the end of the school year and are just about to learn the last letter.  So we have a beautiful collection of letter cards and Hands-On Letters.  I wanted to do something with them.  Maybe organize them in a way that they can be used routinely in our home for preschool and beyond.  I had an empty binder and bought some sheet protectors and started putting it all together.  I am so thrilled with the finished product.

In the front pocket of the binder I put the Word Puzzles and I put the Word Puzzle Keys on a binder ring.

These Word Puzzles have one or two letters and one or two blank lines.  The idea is to complete the word, or fill in the blank, with the correct letter or letters.  The Hands-On Letters fit perfectly on the blank spaces to complete the words.  The child can use the Word Puzzle Key to find the answers.  They actually color coordinate, so if he wanted to find the word that goes with the top card he could search the blue key cards for the answer.  (You can see more details on this in the video I have posted below)

This is a great tool of course, but impossible to use if the Hands-On Letters are a scattered mess.  I had originally had a drawer that I used to put all the letters in.  But when we sat down to use them to build words it was frustrating and time consuming to find what we were looking for.  I knew I needed to find a better way to organize them and decided to see if I could find a way to use sheet protectors.

I chose to put two letters in each sheet protector.  I decided on this for a variety of reasons.  One was to save on supplies, the sheet protectors and the name tags I used all cost money of course.  But I also thought when they find the correct letter on the tag they then have to do a little problem solving to pull out the correct Hands-On Letters. 

I happened to have a stack of these name tags (I guess they are officially called name plates) on hand.   So I slid one into the end of each sheet protector and labeled it with the uppercase and lowercase letters.  I really like how this turned out.  It makes the book even easier to use.  When you are searching for the letter you can simply thumb through the name plates at the end of the pages until you find the right one and then flip it open. 

The second part of this book has all the Letter Set pages with the color side up.  The color side has the uppercase and lowercase letter which are the same size as the Hands-On Letters.  I put this side up so that my children could finger trace, or use dry erase crayons to practice writing. 

I also wanted the colored side up so there were no pictures visible.  On the back, white side, of the card there are two pictures that show an item that phonetically starts with that letter. 

So for T the pictures are /t/ree and /t/rain.  I wanted to be able to use this book for review purposes by flipping to a letter and asking what sound it makes.  If the pictures were visible it would give it away.  However, they could still independently flip through the book and try to recall the sounds of each letter.  If they got stuck, they could always lift the page to get some help.

I did my best to explain it with pictures and words but I also put together a quick video.  It might make it a little more clear to see the book in action.

An InLinkz Link-up