Manipulatives give children the opportunity to interact with the alphabet through hands-on play.

They are able to feel the shape of the objects and arrange multiple items to form letters and words.

They can see the curves and the lines that come together to form each letter, and some manipulatives even allow children to explore letter formation and tracing.

We used manipulatives (in this case, letter cards) as part of our bat theme.

To do this, we did a couple of things.

First, the students were given a note card with the word BAT written on it.

Then, they were given the cards (manipulatives) to match to the correct letter.

Lastly, we sounded out each letter until we created the word!