Learning with Letter Tiles

Dear Educator,

I hope your new school year is going along well. Here in California, we are celebrating winter as usual, getting ready to ship our new 2007 products and catalog . . . and preparing the inaugural edition of our Primary Concepts newsletter. We hope you’ll enjoy these activities, tips, product spotlights, and special offers. We’ll focus on a different topic in each monthly newsletter, so if you have a request or a comment, please send it along. We’d love to hear from you!

I look forward to sharing our news with you, and getting your feedback.

Best wishes,

Rosalind Iiams, Editor
editor@primaryconcepts.com

In this Issue:

• Hands-On Learning with Letter Tiles
• Activity: Letter Sound Lotto
• Useful Letter Tile Links
• Product Spotlight: Primary Concepts Letter Tiles
• Web Specials: Learning with Letter Tiles Plus Complete Kit
• Share Your Thoughts: Favorite Letter Tile Activities
• Next Month’s Topic: Language Development
• Quote of the Week

Why use letter tiles? Letter tiles give children hands-on experience with important phonics concepts and skills. They offer an engaging way to give children daily practice with phonics and word study. Letter tiles are versatile: they can be used in all primary grades, at all literacy levels. Finally, it is easy to find additional materials and templates to expand your letter tile activities.

Obtaining your letter tiles. You can make your own letter tiles by copying a template onto cardstock, laminating, and cutting tiles. Or purchase plastic letter tiles for a quicker start and longer-lasting use. 

Teaching Tip: If you make your own tiles, it is helpful to copy the vowels onto red paper to emphasize the special role that vowels play in words.

There are two main types of letter tiles:
•    Alphabet Letter Tiles  are single tiles.
•    Letter Cluster Tiles  are multi-letter tiles (ch, sp, br, ou, ing). Clusters include blends, digraphs, vowel pairs, rimes, and word endings.

Although it is possible to build any words with just the alphabet letter tiles, letter cluster tiles add the benefit of helping children think of important groupings of letters as one unit. For example, when trying to read or spell the word strand, it is easier to think of the str as a unit and the and as a unit than it is to think of six individual sounds. Research has shown that when children recognize these letter groupings as units rather than as individual sounds, they move more quickly to fluent reading and accurate spelling.

You can also make or purchase tiles for use on an overhead projector, to demonstrate activities and phonics concepts.

Organizing your letter tiles. Being able to find the tiles you need quickly is critical to success with letter tiles. Containers with spaces for each alphabet letter are best.
Teaching Tip:  You may choose to put the blends in with the single letter tiles (bl and br with the b tiles). Or you can put each type of cluster tiles in separate containers.

Try this quick-start activity to give children practice recognizing beginning consonant sounds, blends and digraphs, ending sounds, or short vowel sounds.

[Lesson taken from Learning with Letter Tiles, by Joan Westley (Primary Concepts Product No. 1406).]

All our letter tiles are made of high-quality plastic resin, with red vowels and black consonants. One of our most popular products, “Letter Tiles in a Box,” shown above, comes in both one-sided and two-sided versions, both in a 26-compartment organizer box with latching lid.

Other popular configurations and tile types include:
Student Letter Tiles (lowercase only): Single pack and 20-pack
One-Sided or Two-Sided Alphabet Letter Tiles (20-pack), including 5 Letter Tile Organizers
Letter Cluster Tiles (also available in 4-pack and 20-pack)
Overhead Letter Tiles
Overhead Cluster Tiles

Visit our website for a full listing of types and configurations of tiles, and associated products to use with your tiles.

If you prefer to make your own tiles, Learning with Letter Tiles contains templates for letter tiles and cluster tiles, plus picture cards, word building cards, word cards, and game and activity sheets.

February specials, online only!

Do you have a favorite activity with letter tiles? Share it with us! Send your activity (electronic photos are great too) to editor@primaryconcepts.com. We’ll share selected activities in our next newsletter.

Do you have English Language Learners in your classroom, or native speakers who are struggling with oral language? We’ll share some of our favorite tips and techniques to get young students talking, describing, and enlarging their vocabularies.

An understanding heart is everything in a teacher, and cannot be esteemed highly enough. One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feeling. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child.
-- Carl Gustav Jung