Digital Snowball Letter Sounds Matching Phonics Activity
Bring winter fun to your literacy lessons with this digital snowball letter sounds matching activity, perfect for practicing sound isolation.
Snowball Letter Sounds Matching Activity
As students continue to work on their letter recognition and letter sounds skills, it is essential that they begin manipulating the sounds in words. One of the first ways in which students do this is by isolating the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words. This phonemic awareness skill is the stepping stone to blending sounds and decoding CVC words.
This digital snowball letter sounds matching activity is tons of fun and reinforces letter and sound recognition and teaches letter-sound isolation in a fun, winter-themed way!
With these snowball letter sound matching mats, students have the opportunity to practice isolating the beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words. There are 5 snowball mats, each focusing on one type of sound.
Students will use their phonemic awareness, phonics, and critical thinking skills to match the lowercase snowball letter pieces to the pictures found on the mat.
This snowball letter sounds matching activity is ideal for students in kindergarten and first grade. It can be adapted to work with some preschool students who are ready for this challenge as well. Since this activity is digital, it makes a great in class or at home learning activity.
Setting Up the Snowball Activity in Google Slides
Students may use Google Slides™ to do this activity.
The download file includes a detailed guide with instructions and pictures on how to use this activity with your students, but it is quite simple to do.
If you are an instructor or teacher, you will want to copy the Google Slides assignment to your Google Drive and save it as a master copy.
Make sure that you click the dropdown next to the attachment. Pick the “Make a copy for each student” option.
Setting Up the Letter Matching Activity in Seesaw
Students can also use this activity in Seesaw, if you would like.
You will click the Seesaw specific link in the download file. When you arrive at the activity, you will need to click the “Save Activity” button. Then you will assign the activity to your students.
Learning Letters and Sounds
In this winter-themed alphabet game, students will look at the pictures on the digital snowball mat. The mat will either focus on beginning, middle, or ending sounds. The students will determine what the correct sound for that picture is. They will find the matching lowercase letter snowball piece and drag and drop it over the picture, almost like throwing a snowball!
Once students know the format of how to play, they will be able to use all 5 mats with success independently, making this activity a great independent practice or homework option as well.
There are a variety of ways to use this winter activity in your classroom or at home with your students. Use this winter activity for:
- Whole group practice.
- Mini-lesson activity.
- Small group practice.
- Literacy centers.
- Guided reading groups.
- Intervention or extension activity.
- Technology centers.
- Independent practice activity.
- Digital homework (at school or at home).
- Informal assessment.
- Early finisher activity.
- Choice board or free choice activity.
- Distance learning option.
- Winter learning activity.
Differentiated Snowball Letter Matching
Since this activity contains 5 different mats, 3 beginning sounds, 1 middle sound, and 1 ending sound, the options for differentiation are endless! Each mat has 9 different pictures, so that is 45 different opportunities for your students to enhance their letter sound skills!
A good option is to begin with the beginning sounds mats. Once students have a strong grasp of this concept, move on to the middle and ending sounds mats. It is good practice to observe the students and see which sounds they are doing well with and which ones are more challenging.
If students need to work on a particular sound, you can assign only those sound mats. You can also scaffold the learning by incorporating more mats each time until the students are completing them all successfully.
To challenge your students further, you can mix up the order of the mats, have students choose one to work on, have them complete it, and then choose another. This makes it fun for the students. For advanced learners, they could sound out and write each word on a recording sheet and underline or highlight the focus sound. These mats could even be used as a bingo board for students to see who can get their entire mat covered first!
This digital snowball letter sounds matching activity will help your students brush up and grow their skills after winter break. They will soon be moving from letter and sound recognition to isolating sounds in words and decoding CVC words!
If your students are begging for more fun digital activities using Google Slides and Seesaw, check out our library of digital activities for math and literacy.
Click the button below to get the Digital Snowball Letter Sounds Matching activity for Google Slides and Seesaw.
Want a self-checking version of this activity? Check out the Snowball Letter Sounds Matching on Boom Learning!
Here are some more winter activities for you!
Snowman Spin and Cover Word Work Games