The Moveable Alphabet

When young children have discovered that words are made up of sounds and know some of the symbols for these sounds, they can begin writing.  Montesori suggested using a premade-alphabet, so the child is not limited by their ability to write with a pencil (we have many other activities that help strengthen a child's pincer grip and pencil control).

The Large Moveable Alphabet is made of plastic or wooden letters that the child uses to build words, phases and eventually sentences...laying each letter out on a rug. This activity is introduced to a child once he/she recognize 10-12 letters by their sound (or phoneme).  This is typically somewhere between 4 and 5 years of age.  The child is invited to think of a word and then find the letters that they hear, in the order that they hear them.  These initial word building activities are all practice "building" words rather than "spelling" words.  For the first few months that a child works with the moveable alphabet there is no redirction to "spelling" a word correctly, rather everything is phonetic.

Some real examples of the words children  have built with the moveable alphabet are:

•  elfnt (elephant)
• wlrs (walrus)
• mi cor iz blw (my car is blue)
• sprm wals et cril (sperm whales eat krill)

Unlike Italian, which is a completely phonetic language, English is hodgpodge of various languages and not phonetic at all!  To address "spelling" we introduce the child to phonograms (two letters together make a new sound for example "p"+"h" = the sound "f" and puzzle words (for example; the, we, I, their).  This is typically introduced to a child in their kindergarten year between 5-6 years of age using smaller moveable alphabet sets.