Sorting Game Using Alphabet Sound Cards

Vito is 38 months old.

I am so excited that I finally found a way to keep Vito engaged in the alphabet sorting activity.  You see we always sort out objects according to their letter sound (see it here), but my problem is that Vito is more interested with the objects rather than participating in the activity.  The moment I opened the box for us to sort, he would take away one object at a time and he refuses to do the activity and would play instead.  Now this is fine, I have no problems with it.  In fact, this happened to Mavi too.  I let them play with the objects first but then would ask them to participate in the activity right after.  It was temporary for Mavi, he loved sorting objects according to beginning letters rather than playing with them.  As for Vito, it’s different.  He is still in a stage of being “playful” so our sorting activities are sometimes a struggle.  He knows how to do it, but refuses because of the object.

My solution:  I tried using a printed image instead of the objects and tada, he finished everything in a matter of seconds!  With this, we are going to work on printed materials for now, and maybe mix them with objects occasionally just to test whether he has overcome his obsession with tiny figures.


Okay so here’s what I have, I’m using Montessori Movable Alphabet and Melissa & Doug Alphabet Magnets.  We are using the Sandpaper Letters most of the time but I love to put some variety in our alphabet figures so I used whatever alphabet materials we have.


The cards are from my shop (Alphabet Beginning Sound Sorting Cards), I made these when Mavi was around 4 years old.  We don’t work on all 26 letters, we do it by fours (RAMF, BITG, CUSN, POLH, DEXQ, YJKV, ZX).  We are already working on the POLH, and if you want to check our past sorting activities you can check our Instagram account for the photos.  We worked on each group for a week then move on to the next.



To keep Vito engaged, I would ask him to pick a card, tell me what it is and he’ll match the image to its beginning letter sound.  He liked this idea!


For the number of cards to introduce, I suggest you start with one first, you can add more cards as the child progresses.  Here I prepared 3 cards for each letter but as I observed, it’s a lot of work for Vito already.  He seems pretty good with two cards but started to scratch his eye and became uninterested after that.  So I just encouraged him a little more to finish the work.


There are so many ways Mavi and I used the cards and hopefully, Vito and I can try them out too, like:

• I spy game
• memory game
• ordering the pictures from A to Z
• sound games (goes with I spy as well)
• I also created an outline version for the images and we did some coloring

I really hope this will work!  And if you are curious on how much time do we spend on doing phonics, it’s from 15 minutes and longer, depending on the child.  Mavi will work for hours, but I don’t know with Vito yet.  We’ll see!

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