Gingerbread Letters: Six Ideas for using these letters

I wanted to shake up my kindergarten instruction so I made these simple gingerbread cards. When I made them, I originally was going to use them as flash cards to "warm up" at the beginning of our group time. Then I started going and we ended up using these for the entire time! Here is what we ended up doing with these gingerbread men:

First, we used them as flash cards. Students had them in a pile and went through and reviewed their letter names.

Next, we sorted the cards by upper and lower case. Then they matched the upper and lower case together. 

After that we reviewed the letter sounds using only the lowercase letter cards.

We had the gingerbread vowel run to a consonant to practice blending words. Most of the words were nonsense words, but the point was to practice blending sounds together. This group of kids isn't ready to blend three sounds yet, so we focusing on two sounds. It was a lot of fun!

Click on the picture to watch the video. :)

We practiced segmenting sounds. They were able to segment three letter words with guidance. I said the word, then we all segmented the sounds together a couple of times. Then they tried to pull down the correct letters to make that word.

Last, we worked on manipulating sounds They had lots of guidance but I really saw improvement by the end. I would repeat the word and "touch and say" each sound. 

For example, I would say, map, /m/ /a/ /p/ as I touched each sound. Then I would say a new word, like mip, /m/ /i/ /p/. I would touch the cards again to help them see which sound changed.  A few kids were able to touch and say the cards on their own to determine which sound changed.

If you want to print out these cards to use with your kids, you can download them here. 

For more gingerbread ideas, click here to see my past posts. There are quite a few freebies if you scroll all the way through!

   I have a huge gingerbread unit in my TPT store as well. You can find that here: