Fall Tree Letter Matching Game

Fall Tree Letter Matching Activity

I love to set up simple letter matching activities with stickers. My son enjoys them and I find that they are an excellent way to teach letter recognition and provide him with valuable fine motor practice. While peeling the backs off of the leaf stickers and placing them on the paper, children will use the small muscles in their hands that are needed to write and do various other life skills. Playing and interacting with letters is a great way to discuss letter names and increase letter recognition ability.

Set Up the Matching Game

Materials Needed:

Leaf stickers (I found mine at the dollar store)

Paper

Brown marker

Permanent marker

Use the brown marker to draw a tree with empty branches. Write all of the letters of the alphabet around the branches of the tree one time each. Or you can choose a group of letters to write on the tree and repeat a few times.

Write the same letters you wrote around the tree on the leaf stickers. Make sure that you have one matching leaf for every letter on the tree.

Make one tree and set of letters for each child in your small group.

child placing leaves with letters onto a tree on paper

Match the Leaves

Invite the children to match each leaf to the corresponding letter on the tree. I find that it is helpful to model this with a couple of leaves before turning it over to children to do independently.

While the children are working on the tree, make sure to mention the names of the letters they are currently working on. Simple comments like “That ‘a’ was hiding from you, but you found it!” or “Can you find the letter ‘b’ now?”

For older children, you can write lowercase letters on the leaves and uppercase letters on the tree and have them match the lowercase letters to their uppercase counterparts.

You could also do this as a class by going through each letter one by one as a group. You would call out a letter, your students will then look in the leaf pile to find the correct letter. Then they will look for that letter on the tree branches and place the leaf over it. This continues until all of the letters on the tree are covered.

You can also turn this into an alphabet center activity by placing copies of the alphabet tree in your ABC Center along with a pocket cube and some bingo daubers. Write some letters on index cards and place them in the pocket cube. Children can roll the cube and locate the matching letter on their sheet, then use the bingo dauber to mark the letter.

Tree on paper with fall leaves with letters on them taped to the tree

I love that the final product was a really pretty fall tree that you can hang on the wall!

BIO: Danielle is a former elementary teacher, a mom of two and now writes at Mom Inspired Life. Are you looking for more fall alphabet activities? Check out her wildly popular Apple Tree Letter Matching Activity or this fun Fall Tree Alphabet Game! You can connect with Danielle by subscribing to her newsletter or following her on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter.