The Montessori Moveable Alphabet Colors

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 that 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 & Lessons are:

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

How to Chose the Colors of your Moveable Alphabet

Prior to 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 Montessori language late).

Traditionally the sandpaper letters come in either pink consonant 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 you think would make the most sense to your child.

Once you've chosen the colors you want to use, be sure to check out our tutorial on how to prepare your Printed Moveable Alphabet and take a look at the picture cards and extension lessons available in our store.


When To Add More Colors to the Moveable Alphabet

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 to 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.

We offer the following color options for our printed Moveable Alphabet letters so that you can choose the various colors for phonograms, story writing, and a variety of other extension lessons in the language area.

Now an example of how a greater visual impression can be made using 1 color for the phonogram and another color for the remaining letters. See how clearly the phongrams stand out.