School Sparks - Kindergarten Readiness

Letter scrambles are wonderful letter recognition games

Letter recognition games are a broad category of children’s games that focus on identifying and recognizing letters in different ways. Through years in the classroom, I found that letter scrambles were a fun - and effective - letter recognition game for preschool and kindergarten children.

Tips for using the letter recognition games on this page

When your child looks at each letter scramble for the first time, he may be overwhelmed by the amount and variety of the letters he sees. That is normal. These word scrambles were designed to be challenging letter recognition games. But, they were also designed to be achievable for young children.

Before your child picks up his pencil to begin connecting the letters, ask him to point to and name the letter in the circle at the top of the page and also the letter in the square at the bottom of the page. Remind him that the circle contains the uppercase version of the letter and the square holds the lowercase version of the same letter. As your child completes the letter recognition game, these letters can serve as guides if your child is not totally confident recognizing both forms of the new letter, so encourage him to refer back to them, as needed.

Once your child has properly identified the uppercase and lowercase versions of the letter, ask him to move his finger across each row, stopping to say the featured letter’s name each time he finds it. (If he knows the names of other letters, he can say those names as well.)

After your child has reviewed the letters across all six rows on the letter recognition game, ask him to put his finger back on the colored circle in the upper left corner of the letter scramble, which is the starting point. Moving slowly, direct him to move his finger from one featured letter to the next, mindful of the fact that he can connect both uppercase and lowercase versions of the letter to get from the starting point to the ending point of the letter recognition game. If you notice your child moving to an incorrect letter, ask him to “look again” so that he can correct himself before he continues on his path.

When your child can smoothly move along the letter path, encourage him to go back to the start of the letter scramble and, using a pencil or marker, connect the letters one more time.

More engaging letter recognition games to try at home

• Use bathtub crayons to write different letters on the bathtub wall. Call out a particular letter’s name and challenge your child to erase that letter with water as quickly as possible.
• Create a matching game by writing the uppercase version of a letter on one card and the lowercase version of the letter on a different card. Repeat this for all 26 letters. Spread the lowercase letters face-up on the table in front of your child and give him the stack of uppercase letters to hold. One at a time, have him look at an uppercase letter card and match it to the corresponding lowercase letter card on the table.
• Without trying to read the words, open a magazine or newspaper and have your child circle all of a certain letter on the page and then connect the circled letters. With a popular letter like A or T, the result will be a giant star burst on the page as your child connects the many letters he found, whereas other letters such as X or Z may only appear a few times.