Camping Alphabet Activity – Building S’mores Beginning Sounds
Are you looking for an engaging way to enhance your preschoolers’ letter recognition skills? Our camping alphabet activity – Building S’mores Beginning Sounds is the perfect educational tool! Ideal for preschoolers and kindergarten students, this activity combines the excitement of a camping theme with effective letter recognition activities.
Children will have a blast as they build s’mores while identifying and matching beginning sounds to their corresponding letters. This interactive approach not only makes learning fun but also reinforces essential literacy skills. Perfect for a classroom setting or at-home learning, this activity promises to keep little ones entertained while boosting their reading readiness.
This camping alphabet activity was designed to enhance letter recognition and phonological awareness among preschoolers. This engaging activity involves children in the process of constructing s’mores by associating the initial sounds of words with their corresponding letters.
In using this activity, preschoolers will improve their ability to recognize and differentiate between various letter sounds (developing letter sound recognition), an essential foundational skill for early reading.
Additionally, they will practice fine motor skills by manipulating the pieces to build their s’mores, reinforcing hand-eye coordination.
Ideal for both classroom and at-home learning, our s’mores-themed printable ensures that children remain interested and motivated to learning the alphabet and beginning sound skills. Our preschool phonics lesson plans are loaded with daily lessons that include interactive alphabet games like this one.
This might look like just a camping themed bingo game, but keep reading to see multiple crazy-creative ways to use this free printable.
Why Letter Sound Recognition in Preschool?
Recognition of letters is a fundamental part of learning how to read. There are a lot of pre-reading skills that must be mastered. Without it, children struggle with learning letter sounds and recognizing words. Children who cannot recognize letters and name them with their sounds will have difficulty learning how to read.
Research has long supported the approach of teaching reading with letter recognition. The fact is that a beginning readers’ knowledge of the alphabet is a strong predictor of later reading success.
The National Early Literacy Panel (NELP) meta-analyzed 52 such studies that had connected alphabetic knowledge (including letter recognition and sounds generation) with the later decoding ability of 7,570 kids. They found a strong relationship between the two; the more letter names the kids knew, the greater their later success in decoding.
The same research has also shown that learning letters and playing with letters frequently leads to an interest in their sounds and in reading. Many letter names share an auditory link with their sounds, thus effectively doing double duty as it helps bridge the gap between phonemic awareness and letter recognition to other phonics skills.
How to Teach Beginning Sounds
Summer is the perfect time to teach beginning sounds, because you’ve probably already spent the school year working hard on all the letter names, letter sounds, and other pre-literacy skills. So now your preschooler is really, really ready for the phonics piece that comes with beginning sound knowledge.
Beginning sounds is just one of many pre-literacy skills kids need to become good readers, and usually right around summertime is when they are really, really prepared to learn beginning sounds if they haven’t already.
Building S’mores Beginning Sounds – a Camping Alphabet Activity
These s’mores beginning sound activities for preschoolers are too fun and make a great addition to your camping theme. There are two versions of this printable along with ideas to adapt these activities for preschoolers of all developmental levels.
What You Get
This alphabet printables include 26 full color pages of alphabet learning fun! Each page features two s’mores cards, one with darkened alphabet letters and a second card with the letter outline for tracing. Teachers can choose which card set os most appropriate for their student.
The printable also include three full color pages of all the goodies to build the s’mores using beginning sound pictures – the chocolate and the toasted marshmallow.
Materials
- Building S’mores Beginning Sounds Printable
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The Set-Up
Print out the s’mores beginning sounds mats on heavy cardstock, then cut apart the mats and the cards. You can laminate them for extra durability and to prolong their usability.
Once you’re ready for your students to use them, arrange the mats in a stack on the table with a pile of chocolate cards and a pile of marshmallow cards.
You may also want to provide a dry erase sleeve and dry erase marker to use with the letter tracing mats.
Building S’mores Letter Sound Alphabet Game
There are two versions of this activity. The first version is just a letter recognition and beginning sounds activity.
In the second version, students will also practice writing by tracing the letters on the s’mores card with a dry erase marker.
Letter Sound Recognition Matching
To use the first version of the activity, students will select a mat from the stack and identify the letter on it and say the sound. Then they will look for the chocolate card with the image that has that letter’s beginning sound and place it on the card.
Next they will repeat the above step with the marshmallow card.
Letter Sound Recognition with Tracing Letters
With the second version of the activity, students will start the same way, but before looking for the picture cards with the correct beginning sound, they will practice writing by tracing the uppercase and lowercase letter.
The letters on the second version are traceable letters, which means they feature a font that encourages correct letter formation!
This activity would go great in a sensory bin, too. Check out how we did this with our Valentine’s Day Sensory Bin with Beginning Sounds.
Preschool Beginning Sound Worksheets
If your kinder-bound little one needs more practice with beginning sounds activities than this camping alphabet activity, you might like to try some of these alphabet activities.
You can easily add any or all of these to your camping themed lesson plan.
- Alphabet Find & Circle Worksheets
- Alphabet Beginning Sound Picture Seek
- Beginning Sound Tracing Cards
- Alphabet Booklets
- Beginning Sound Sorting Worksheets
- Matching Beginning Sounds Worksheets
- Dot the Sounds Beginning Sound Activity
Ways to Differentiate
My preschoolers loved this camping alphabet activity. In fact, I think I could turn any alphabet activity into one they would love if I made it all about s’mores! Who doesn’t love a s’more?!
But like all my printable activities, my favorites are the ones I can use in multiple ways. Here are some ideas on how you can use this single printable to meet the needs of multiple students in your classroom.
- To make this activity easier for early learners, focus on teaching a few letter sounds at a time.
- Place a small amount of mats and cards on the table with different sounds so your preschooler can really hear the difference. This will also help them not get too overwhelmed by so many cards.
- Use this activity to introduce new letters during circle time and make a s’more each day.
- Wouldn’t it be fun to have a camping themed “alphabet camp” during the summer, and every day you make a new s’more with your class? Imagine this in a camping themed classroom!
- Another fun camping themed activity is to pull out only the letter cards and picture cards needed to spell your preschooler’s name.
- Have them practice putting the letters in order, and make the connection that the letter sounds correspond with all sorts of pictures with the same sound, too.
Get Your S’mores Beginning Sounds Activity Here
Dreaming of a pretend campfire, sleeping bags, and strumming a guitar with your preschoolers? If you’re doing a camping theme in your classroom and you’re looking for the best ever camping alphabet activity (with beginning sounds), well, you know I have you covered.
Just fill out the form below and I’ll send you the printable!
I’m Sarah, an educator turned stay-at-home-mama of five! I’m the owner and creator of Stay At Home Educator, a website about intentional teaching and purposeful learning in the early childhood years. I’ve taught a range of levels, from preschool to college and a little bit of everything in between. Right now my focus is teaching my children and running a preschool from my home. Credentials include: Bachelors in Art, Masters in Curriculum and Instruction.
