These FREE Winter Mapping Mats are a fantastic and FUN way to integrate a winter theme into your word work time! In this free pack, you’ll find three mapping mats:
1- a present {several December holidays}
2- a snowman {Winter}
3- a heart {for Valentine’s Day}
Find more mats in our Seasonal Mapping Mats Pack.
Need more winter printables? Find all our Free Winter Printables and Activities.
*The FREE download can be found at the END of this post. Scroll down to click on the teal download button.
Winter Mapping Mats
Have you ever heard of phoneme-grapheme mapping? It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. All we’re doing is getting kids to connect letter sounds (phoneme) with the actual letter (grapheme) to read and spell words. This is vital!
If you’re curious to get a deeper understanding into why this is important for our learners, I highly encourage you to visit these posts:
What is the Alphabetic Principle?
Teaching Phonemic Awareness
What is Orthography?
I have three FREE winter mapping mats you can download to help your learners build meaningful relationships between letters and letter sounds to spell and read words. These are just a few of the mats you’ll find in my Seasonal Mapping Mats Pack.
Using the Winter Mapping Mats
Before you start, each learner will need a mapping mat and four small counters. You could use math counters or even dried beans.
Step 1. Call a word out to your learners. You can use a seasonal word, like flake, or a different word. {My complete pack has seasonal words included for winter.} The word you call needs to have between two and four phonemes so it will fit in the boxes during Steps 3 and 4.
Note: Just because a word has five letters DOES NOT mean the word has five sounds. For example, flake has FIVE letters but only FOUR phonemes: /f/-/l/-/a/-/k/.
Step 2: The learner repeats the word you’ve called. They then separate/segment and count the sounds in the word. As they do, they drag one counter over to the inside of image on the mat {such as a snowman} for each SOUND they hear.
After they have, ask them, “How many sounds are in the word?” {4 sounds in flake}
Step 3: Learners then drag the counters down that represent the sounds into the boxes below.
Step 4: Starting with the first sound in the word, encourage learners to remove the counter and then write the letter(s) that represent each sound until they have spelled the entire word. Be sure you help with this step so that words are spelled correctly.
Step 5: It might be tempting, but DON’T SKIP THIS STEP! Ask learners to read the word they just spelled. This step requires learners blend the sounds back together to read the word.
Grab the entire pack in my shop
or keep scrolling for the free mats.
Grab these free mats by clicking below
Enjoy autumn!
~Becky
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