To get started with Mystery Letter Bags, as suggested by the Pre-K Alphabet Ideas website, place items with names that have the same beginning letter in lunch-size paper bags. Write the letters on the bottom of the bags. Make one bag of items for each letter of the alphabet. For the letter "A," place a plastic apple, an acorn and a toy airplane inside. In the "B" sack, place a book, balloons and a plastic banana. Find at least three items to put into each sack. Label the outside of the sack with the words,"Mystery Letter Bag." To use the Mystery Letter Bags, choose a child to come to the front of the classroom and select a bag. Let the child take each item from the bag, name it, then place it on a table. When the child has named all of the items, ask him to guess what letter is on the bottom of the bag. When he guesses correctly, he may place the bag on one side of the table, labeled "Consonants," or the other side of the table, labeled "Vowels."
Get the whole class on their feet, then back down in their chairs, for a game of Stand Up or Sit Down, as suggested on the Teachnology website. Teach letter recognition and letter sounds while your students practice naming letters and determining whether they are consonants or vowels. Use a white board to write a class member's first name. Hold the board up so that all of your students can see it. Point to the letters, one at a time, as the class names them. Ask your students to do it again, but this time to stand when a letter is a vowel and to sit when a letter is a consonant. Repeat the game until everyone's name has been used.
Write two consonants on the classroom chalkboard to be the first and last letters of a three-letter word. Leave a space in between the two consonants for a vowel. Write a list of all of the vowels along the bottom of the board so the children can refer to it when they decide which letter should go in the middle of the word. Help your class make the sounds of the first and last letters. Ask your class to choose a vowel to insert in the middle space. If you write the letter "C" as the first letter and the letter "W" as the last letter, children may choose the letter "O" for you to write in the middle. Ask them what sound the "O" makes in the word. Read the word as a class, sounding out each letter. Erase the word and choose two new consonants for a new three letter word. Remember that children may not choose a vowel to insert between the consonants that spells a known word. It is up to the teacher to decide to sound out these words or not. An option is to call the words "nonsense words" and sound them out anyway.