Uppercase Lowercase Letter Match Activity Inspired by The Three Snow Bears
Inside: a free printable uppercase and lowercase letter match activity that you can use after reading aloud The Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett, or with a polar bear unit.
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I love Jan Brett’s beautiful winter books and have made activities for The Mitten and a cute craft for The Snowy Nap. Today I’m adding a simple learning activity to go with another Brett favorite.
The Three Snow Bears is a fun arctic twist on the classic “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” story. In Jan Brett’s version, an Inuit girl wanders into a polar bear family’s igloo. She tries out the bears’ soup, boots, and beds until she finds the ones that are “just right”.
Uppercase Lowercase Letter Match Activity
As a followup to the book, children can sort letters into “too big” (i.e. capital letters), “too small” (i.e. lowercase letters), and “just right” (i.e. both uppercase and lowercase).
Preparation
You can get your own copy of this activity in the Download section at the bottom of this post.
All you need to do to get this activity ready is to print it out and cut apart the letters. You may want to laminate it for durability.
Then, select the letters that you want your students to work on. You can separate the three types of cards (uppercase, lowercase, both), or leave them mixed up, depending on your students’ needs.
Finally, if you’ll be using the optional recording sheet, make copies of that for students to write on. Or, you can skip the copies and just insert it into a dry erase pocket.
How to Play
If your kids have learned all their capital letters but are only beginning to work on lowercase letters, you can present cards for just 5-10 letters at once. I’d give them the “both” cards and have them search for the uppercase and lowercase cards.
For students only working on a subset of letters, you can adapt the recording sheet by tracing those letters with a highlighter.
For more advanced students, you can start with the “both” cards removed. These children can match the big and little letters first, and then use the uppercase lowercase “both” cards to check their work. Finally, they can trace their letters on the recording sheet.
Extend the Learning
To extend the learning from this uppercase lowercase letter match activity, you can turn back to The Three Snow Bears book. Open to one of the pages near the end that has just one sentence on it. Ask the children,
“Are these letters mostly uppercase or lowercase?”
“Can you find any uppercase letters?”
Then talk about how when they learn to read they’ll mostly be seeing lowercase letters – and isn’t it exciting that they’re learning them now!
Of course, you’ll also want to compare this book to Goldilocks and the Three Bears. You can also look at the illustrations and compare them to another one of Brett’s books. (Preschool and kindergarten is a little soon to do a serious comparison, but you can lead your little ones through this.)
Download the Polar Bear Printable
Ready for the free uppercase lowercase letter match activity?
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Happy Teaching,
Heather