Kathy Cothran

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Children love to create the alphabet by using their bodies! Putting the children into groups of four or five students, distribute the letters, one at a time, to each group. Keep in mind the shape of the letter as to whether you assign it to a group of four students or five. For instance, the "A" could use 5 students, two on each side and then the extra child as the cross bar between the sides. The same is true for the Q and the G. X works great with 4 students, as does M and Z. When I do this project, I start with a list of all the letters and put a check by it when I assign it to a group, and cross it off when I've photographed the letter. There isn't anything worse than thinking you've finished only to find you missed a letter along the way. With a class of 25 students, photographing all the letters can be done within one half hour of time. If you need to slow this lesson down, I encourage adding a tongue twister component. With this, before the group can ask for another letter they must have written a tongue twister for the letter they just finished building. Then combine the photographs and the tongue twisters for a Living Alphabet class book.