Letter Matching with Hearts

Last year my awesome sister sent the kids this fun and educational letter game!  She called it Lower Case Love and made it by printing each lower case letter on pink and red paper.  Then, being the superstar that she is, she cut them into heart shapes and even laminated them.  (Like I said, superstar.)

And, of course, being the former kindergarten teacher she is, she also sent game suggestions.

Here’s what we play:

1. Hunting for Hearts.  Each kid grabs one of our many buckets and tries to find as many hearts as he or she can.  We basically use this as the start of our activity because they love looking for them!
2. Lower Case Letter Match.  Preschoolers don’t even know they are practicing letter identification when they find and match the corresponding red and pink letters together.  This is fun to do after a hunt.  Sometimes I even only hide certain letters I think one of them may need extra practice with.
3. Letter Memory.  Choose a bunch of letter pairs to play with and place them face down on a table.  The kids take turns turning over letters to find matches.  You know the drill.
4. Making Words.  Last year only my PreK-er was able to put the letters together to form words, but this year the 3 1/2 year old was able to play too.  So fun!  For him, my kindergartener made CVC words and had him sound them out, helping him when he got stuck.  He did very well and it was so exciting to see them working together like that.  My kindergartener then tried to see how many sight words she could make off her word wall.

This game can be easily adapted to practice numbers, words, and even be made with different holiday shapes.  What do you do to add a little learning into your holiday fun?