Flannel Friday: Letters from Favorite Characters

As part of this week's Read-Along Story Time, a new activity I have just started for beginning readers at my library, I read the story from Frog and Toad Are Friends where Toad never receives mail, and Frog sends him a letter so that his mailbox will not be empty. I really wanted an activity to go with the concept of mail, so I came up with this guessing game. I used it with poster board, not a flannel board, but that was because of time constraints in creating it - it would work basically the same way on the flannel board.

First, I typed up the following set of letters:

Then I took some plain white envelopes, wrote the names of the individual recipients on the front of each one, and attached an accompanying picture to help the kids identify each name. Finally, I mounted the envelopes on poster board so the whole group could see the whole collection at once.

When they were hung on the bulletin board, they looked like this:

(Forgive the blurry image - it was taken from a distance.)

When I pointed to a letter, I asked the kids to tell me who it was for, then to guess who it was from. The child who guessed correctly got to open the letter for me. Then I read the letters to the group.

This is definitely an activity for kids who are familiar with a lot of books already, so it worked well with the Pre-K and K group I had. With younger kids, I might still use the concept, but maybe only with characters from books we have just read, or with books I have heard them talk about. I think it would also be fun to do another set with characters from fairy tales, or to tell a story using letters, and open one at a time to reveal the next part of the story.

I am this week's Flannel Friday host. The round-up placeholder is right here.