People Who Help Us Alphabet Match

“People Who Help Us” was always one of my favourite early years topics as a teacher. The children would get so excited learning about different roles in society. Since our recent trip to KidZania, Adam is taking more notice of community helpers. I thought I would use the opportunity to create a People Who Help Us Alphabet Match activity. This would expand on his new found interest in jobs and practise matching uppercase and lowercase letters.

Setting up the activity was quick and easy thanks to Twinkl. I downloaded and printed their People Who Help Us Cone People. After cutting out each person I used sellotape to secure the cones. Within a few moments I had plenty of community helper cones to play our game.

Next I needed letters to hide underneath our cone people. I wanted to be able to change the hidden objects quickly so decided to use Thumb Post It Notes. This way I could write on the post it note what letters I wanted Adam to find. As I wanted to focus on letters that looked very different as a capital letter, I wrote the lowercase and uppercase letters a, b, e and g. As I was using nine cone people I realised I would have one post it note spare. I decided to draw a heart on it and use this as a “have another go” option.

I positioned the cone people on top of the post it notes before showing Adam the activity. We spent time together talking about each person and what job they did. We discussed why they needed to wear certain uniforms, why some roles required a hat and how the people helped us in the community.

It was time to play the game. Adam lifted up two cone people at a time. If the two letters were the same then he got to keep the cone people. If the letters were different then the cone people had to be returned and the game continued. If either of us lifted a cone person with the heart underneath, then we were able to pick up another cone person and keep all three people if the letters matched.

As we only used nine cone people the game didn’t last for very long. However, I got Adam to close his eyes whilst I wrote new letters on more post it notes. With different letters we were able to play the game again. This activity could easily be adapted to work on number recognition, shape recognition or simple words.