A few months ago I came across these charming alphabet cards. I particularly liked them as they introduce both capital and small letters in a very associative and visual way. Ale already knows many Russian and English letters as we often talk about them a bit while reading our bed time stories. But the idea that same letter can have two different versions was rather confusing for him. And while in Montessori approach it is recommended to only introduce small letters at first, I found this to be impractical as all the books have both letters on their covers and naturally the subject of small and capital letters would always come into our discussions when we would start reading our bedtime stories.

So in these cards a small and a big version of the same letter is very nicely tied together through the same animal — the grown up one for the capital letter and a baby one for the small letter.

At first I was going to use them for a matching game with Ale, but the cards weren’t treated very gently (naturally.. 🙂 ) and were always scattered all over. Yet I wanted it to be clear that there is a letter “A” and it goes together with “a”, “B” with “b” and so on. So I bought a second set with the idea to make an alphabet chart that would have all the letters clearly laid out in front of them. 🙂 It came out much larger than I anticipated, but I think it is even better so!

To hang the chart I screwed together two pieces of wood at the top and bottom of the chart, added eye hooks at the top, then goes a jute rope and its done!

Alphabet Chart DIY

What you need for the chart:

1. Alphabet cards

   Mine are these from Amazon.

2. A large roll of paper

   My chart came out to be 36″ wide and 54″ tall. I was lucky to get a very large roll of high quality thick paper for free at our local Staples print shop. I was hoping just to buy some paper from them, but they had a roll of paper that they couldn’t mount in their printer, so they just gave it to me. Always worth checking, I suppose 🙂

3. Glue

   We used Elmer’s glue, it I think stick glue might be better as due to having less moisture in it it would warp paper less.

4. Large ruler or a straight stick

5. A pencil

Making it:

1. Determine the dimensions of space where the chart will hang and then obtain the paper that would fit best this space. Just as a reference our chart is 36″ wide and 54″ tall.
2. Roll out your paper on the large table or floor and mark your top, bottom and side margins. Ours are 4″ bottom and top margins, 3¹⁄₈ side margins.
3. Roughly lay out your cards the way you like it. We intentionally placed the cards of the same letter flush to each other, and left good 1³⁄₄ inches space from the next letter, so to keep clear visual structure and prevent it from all looking like a big mass of pictures and letters.
4. Using your layout as a guide calculate the exact spacing between the pairs of cards within a row, and the spacing between your card rows. Our intervals are 1³⁄₄ and the interval between each pair of cards is 1³⁄₄.
5. With a thin pencil and ruler draw the horizontal line guides at equal intervals based on your numbers calculated in step 4. These are the lines along which the tops of your cards will be.
6. Lay out your cards along the drawn lines, leaving the equal interval between each pair of cards, based on the numbers you calculated in step 4.
7. Review to make sure everything looks right and that you put all your cards in the correct order 🙂
8. Once everything is verified start gluing. If you use liquid glue remember moisture will warp the paper, so apply very small amount with the brush on the back of each card.
9. Place heavy books on top of the areas of the chart where you’ve glued the cards and leave overnight.