My daughter recognizes and is able to recall the letters of the alphabet although at times she gets mixed up and it takes her time to remember each letter right away. Therefore I’ve been trying to come up with ways to add in alphabet activities throughout the day that are fun and entertaining for her.

With October about a week away I decided to make a zombie theme game for alphabet recognition. I try to switch out the games monthly or every few months to keep it new and interesting by implementing a new theme.

Save the Brains: Zombie Theme Alphabet Recognition Game.
(Scroll towards bottom of page for free printable.)

Brain Tokens:  Are used to make the game go a little faster.  Especially when using both the lowercase and uppercase decks at the same time. When a player runs out of brain tokens the game is over and each player can begin to count the number of people cards in their house.
Boy cards are lowercase.  Lower case Zombies I chose to use letters that kids often get mixed up the most for example lowercase b, d, are tricky and often are mistaken for each other.
Girl cards are uppercase.  For uppercase Zombie cards I chose to use the back portion of the alphabet kids tend to receive more exposure to uppercase A B C D therefore I wanted to give extra attention to the letters further back in the alphabet.

Game setup.
  -Each player gets a house game board to place the people cards they collect.
  -Pass out an even number of brains to each player.
  -Shuffle the cards and lay them face down.

Objective of the game is to get as many people to safety as possible. At end of game work on simple counting skills by counting up all your people cards on game board.  Whomever has the most wins.

Game Play
Youngest player goes first.
Draw a card from the game deck.
  Person card:  Read the letter on the card out loud.  For extra game play ask the child to name the letter sound as well.   When finished the player places that card in their house.  If the child gets the letter wrong  depending on their age and where they are in their alphabet learning journey you can allow them to place it in their house anyways, or tell them to place the card back in the game deck to try again later.
  Zombie Card:  If the child gets the letter wrong they lose a brain token.  If they say the letter correctly they can steal another players brain to feed to the zombie.  If you get a zombie card you can challenge your child to a race down the hallway in a circle etc.  If you win the race you get one of their brain tokens. If you lose the zombie eats your brain token. 

The first time we played the game I used only the uppercase letter cards to quiz her in a way that didn’t feel like a quiz in order to find out which if any uppercase letters she needed extra help with. She was able to name each one, a few of them she needed help with the letters sound. Therefore I wrote that down in order for more review later. She asked me why there weren’t any boy cards, I explained to her I made all the uppercase letters girls, and all lower case letter boys and that eventually we’d mix both decks together. I chose to do all upper case girls and all lowercase boys in order to be able to quickly sort the cards whenever needed to easily pull out upper or lower case cards.

In the upper case pack I made a y and z zombie because I had 24 people squares to work with. The rest of the zombies I used letters at the end of the alphabet because the first several letters A-D kids are introduced to often through early learning toys and things like that.

We played the game the next day with lowercase letters (boy cards) in order to test her knowledge on lower case letters. The font I used threw her off when it came to the letter q so we talked about how each letter can look a little bit different depending on fonts. Besides that she was able to name each one. She still needs more practice in order to recognize each letter instantly sometimes it takes her a minute staring at the letter before she calls out the correct name other times she’ll say the abc’s in alphabetical order out loud till she comes to the correct letter.

My husband, oldest daughter, and I all colored in our own game boards after I laminated each for durability.

Books above are fun Halloween themed books my daughter’s enjoy reading with me.

P is for Princess is a book my daughters read with me often and enjoy flipping all the flaps. The magnetic letter board is a toy both my daughter’s enjoy playing with and has helped my oldest work on writing letters of the alphabet.

Zombie theme alphabet tote bag is available for purchase at the Nana Hedgehog shop on Redbubble.

Please remember all activities found on LearningWithNanaHedgehog.com are meant to be done with adult supervision and are for personal use only.
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Teaching my daughter the alphabet wasn’t a quick simple process. It took a few years of mixed strategies to get the alphabet to stick inside her brain. I never concentrated on teaching her the ABC song because I didn’t want her to only remember the sequence of letters I wanted to make sure she actually recognized the letters themselves. We did the letter of the week concept several times before it actually sunk in with her.

Now about two years since we began our alphabet journey she knows her letters and their letter sounds. It took practice and constant repetition. After we completed a letter of the week practice a few times through she then began her learning to read journey. In which my husband and I bought a 50 first sight words box set.

In order to motivate her and get her excited about learning the letters of the alphabet and their sounds I made weekly letter of the week goodie bags.

Goodie bag ideas…
-temporary tattoos beginning with the letter of the week
-alphabet stamps
-alphabet acorns
-dot stickers with the corresponding letter written on them

At the time my oldest daughter received her alphabet goodie bags my youngest was less than a year old, although she was real young I wanted to include her in the learning fun therefore my husband and I bought her alphabet cloth tiles to give her a new one each week as her special alphabet surprise.

For a good letter of the week foundation you don’t really need to do anything fancy you don’t even have to be all that creative about it. Each week you can draw a letter on a piece of paper and have them trace it with finger paint, markers, a paint brush, whatever they want to use. Talk to them about the sound of the letter, and mention words that start with that letter. Ask them what words they can think of.

If you want to do something a little more fancy then just tracing basic letters, you can turn letters into simple animals, foods, whatever you and your child can think of. My daughter decided to draw a cat for the letter C. Just have fun and remember it’s not about being perfect it’s just about exposing children to letters and beginning sounds often because the more exposure the better chance they will remember it.

Below are books that my daughter enjoyed reading, in which really helped her to recognize letters.

Below are posters my husband and I recently bought to help promote additional letter recognition practice and to focus in on learning sight words and vowels.

Below are games and tools I used to help keep my daughter’s interest.

My daughter enjoyed the alphabet bean bags, sometimes we would throw them in a laundry basket or a little bucket as she would call out the letter. Other times she would make us an alphabet road we both had to follow and avoid touching the floor.

Another activity that kept her interest involved placing alphabet magnets into a small container and fishing them out using a toy magnetic fishing pole. Sometimes we would use alphabet cards she had to read off and match different pictures and letters to. In the beginning I only placed 4-8 letters in the pretend ocean at a time.

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