Question: "I have been considering getting your movable alphabet along with some pink series cards for my 3-1/2 year-old. Why is the alphabet in so many colors?"

Answer: Our Printed Moveable Alphabet comes with a variation of colors. You can choose the colors that best match your Montessori language materials. The consonants are in one color, the vowels in another. This helps the child to identify the vowel sounds with greater ease.

The color combinations we offer in our Printed Moveable Alphabet and lessons are:

• vowels: red or blue
• consonants: black, pink, red

 

How to choose the color

Before the presentation of the Moveable Alphabet, the children are taught phonetic sounds using Sandpaper Letters (your child may have missed this work if they started the Montessori language late).

Traditionally the sandpaper letters come in either pink consonants and blue vowels or red consonants and blue vowels. We suggest you use the printed Moveable Alphabet colors that match your sandpaper letters so that you avoid confusing your child with a color change.

If your child didn't use sandpaper letters to learn the phonetic sounds, then you can choose the two colors you like and think would make the most sense to your child.

 

When to add more colors

As your child is learning to write words using the printed Moveable Alphabet, they will begin to realize that they want to create/write words with phonograms, but they're not sure which letters make these sounds. When the time is right, you present them with a  lesson on phonograms - separate from the Moveable Alphabet. Then to tie the phonogram work into the Moveable Alphabet, you use another color of the Moveable Alphabet to give a visual impression of the new phonogram you're introducing. It's best to have another storage container with 2 different color sets for phonogram work.

If you use the same consonant/vowel color combination that you use when writing phonetic words with the Moveable Alphabet, the phonograms will look something like the photo directly below. You can clearly see the phonogram at the top of the picture; however, it's difficult to see (identify) the phonogram in each word as it blends in with the other letters.