Get out some milk cap letters for these bright short u spelling mats!
The pack has a set of words for six different word families:
- UM: gum, yum, drum
- UN: sun, bun, run
- UG: hug, mug, bug, rug, jug, tug, plug
- UT: nut, cut, hut
- UCK: duck, puck, truck
- UB: tub, club, sub, rub
Here’s a page from the download. You can see that you’ll need to cut the sheets in half across the horizontal line.
When you print the pages front to back, this is what you’ll see when you turn the cards over. That makes these great for independent work and/or classroom learning centers.
Since I was using them with my four-year-old, we did them together.
Because my Four knows all his letters and sounds, we started right away with the harder side. I told him what the picture was (which can be hard to know, sometimes!) and encouraged him to say the word slowly and pick out the letters.
As you can see from the picture, he missed the middle letter. When he writes in his journal (something we’re doing every day as a family when the older kids get home from school), his spelling reflects this.
I’m excited when he can write the word “cut” as “ct” as a preschooler. That’s actually fabulous! But since this was a focused teaching time, I was able to help him streeeeetch out the word like a rubber band and fit the vowel in there too.
You’ll notice that all the vowels are in red. This is a subtle way to help kids start to distinguish between vowels and consonants.
After he spelled the word on one side, he could turn it over to check his answer.
It was always fun to see that he was correct!
My Two saw the mats and letters and wanted a turn. “Can I spell, too?” I hadn’t considered having him use these, but he loved it. My purpose was different. Instead of having him stretch out words and write the sounds he hears, we focused on matching letters.
Doing this activity was helpful for him because he started to learn some lowercase letters (particularly those like their uppercase counterparts) and practiced distinguishing between them. I gave him all the caps he’d need for a particular mat, and he matched them. (I wouldn’t recommend having a two-year-old search from all the letters in a pile unless he was up for it! Definitely would have overwhelmed my little guy!)
Remember to print pages 2-25 front to back!
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Word Slider Cards
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Amy Narayan
These are fun! Thank you. I wonder if you would consider adding the phonemes ch, th sh, wh, and other vowels such as ou, ow, au, aw, ow, ou, etc and even long vowel patterns for even more uses for the caps.
Andi
I feel like I have died and gone to heaven! YOU are so creative and I love your blog which I have recently discovered! Thank you so much for your clear explainations and tips. Thank you for sharing what you have found successful and for all those wonderful freebie! I am “semi-retired” having taught for 26 years. I took 2 years off and am now a substitute teacher. When I keep uncovering all the layers of yumminess of your site it truly makes me wish I was back in my own classroom full time! (That way I could use a lot of the cute things you have made!)
Anna G
This was such a kind comment and such a day brightener for me, Andi! I’m thrilled that you found my site!
Kara Coyner
Are you going to make some mats for being able to do math problems with the milk tops? Also, will you be making sight words for the milk tops? Would love to be able to have my students make sentences using the milk tops. They are invested in milk top games as they helped collect the milk tops for the last 2 weeks! Thanks!!
Anna G
I wish I could make time for this, Kara, but I’m pretty backed up now with a lot of other projects and plans. Thank you for the suggestions, though!
Maricor B. Manangcawal
Thank you so much! Helpful to my pupils.
Anna Geiger
You’re very welcome, Maricor!