Independent Google Forms for Littles - Letter Recognition Project (& Freebie)
When should students know all their uppercase and lowercase letters?
This is a question that threw a wrench in the works whenever we’d get computer or Chromebook lessons started with Kindergarten each fall.
Ideally, all students would know all their uppercase and lowercase letters before coming to Kindergarten, purely so things would be easier for teachers trying to help students get logged into their computers with usernames and passwords.
However, in reality, knowing all the letters is a Kindergarten Common Core standard. Making things a bit more complicated is that on computers many fonts aren’t necessarily pre-reader friendly. Look at the I and L on your keyboard - can you tell the difference between them? What about when you type a capital I or lowercase L?
I like typing.
Here they are next to each other at the beginning of a sentence.
Note for Nerds: The solution is to make sure your capital Is are written in a serif font, meaning that the letter has its “top and tail” as opposed to a sans serif font, which keeps its letters basic.
From a computer teacher perspective, this means computer lessons have to be directly connected to the literacy progress of the students in class. It also means that we have to be mindful of the fonts we use, and to take things very slowly. In the space of a full year, we can progress from basic mouse skills to typing complete sentences with punctuation at the end (which used to give me the warm fuzzies by June to see how much progress the littles made!)
The following project is a piece designed to help at the beginning of the year when students are practicing letter recognition.
One of my teachers showed me an activity where students had to put letters in alphabetical order and fill in the blank for which was missing. I took the project and made it into a Google Form so it would automatically check student work.
However, for this project, I wanted something to practice recognizing the letters rather than putting them in order. My thought was to provide practice of the letters in isolation. I made it an audio and image-based multiple choice activity rather than expecting students to type capital letters with SHIFT yet or struggle with the way their letters might appear on their keyboards.
On the font side of things, I used the font, Spartan, except for the letter I, for which I used Roboto Slab, a serif font.
To do the activity, for each question students listen to the YouTube video of me reading the prompt and then choose from four options to answer.
I’m working on eventually making different levels of this project. For the first level, practice, students get sent to an OOPS page and then back to the question if they get it wrong.
This means that students get corrected for wrong answers and keep trying until they get it right.
For the second level, it would be an assessment, meaning there would be no redirects for wrong answers. Students wouldn’t get feedback until the end. This version would be intended for teachers to use to find out which letters students do and don’t know.
To make the “redirect” practice version this project, I followed the following steps:
I used Google Slides to make planet backgrounds for each of my letters. I used the Theme Builder feature (formerly the Slide Master feature) to quickly get backgrounds set up. I just made my planets out of basic shapes like circles with text boxes over them for letters. I then went to File → Download and got each slide as a PNG (image) file that I’d be able to add to my Forms.
I created a Google Form that used sections to put one multiple choice question per page. I then put OOPS sections in-between each question.
In each question, I went to the dots at the bottom-right of the question box and enabled shuffling answer choices and going to a section based on the answer. (Or a hack would be to do this for the first question you create and then duplicate the section the number of times you need.)
I used a Google Sheet to create an answer key of which letters would be tested by each number. I referred to this as I entered the correct letter for each question as the first answer choice in the Google Form. (The answer choices will be shuffled so this makes it easy for the teacher but does not impact the order students will see.)
I added the images I created to the answer choices to make this easy to use for beginner trackpad, mouse, or touchscreen users. I entered similar-looking distractors as the other answer choices for each question.
I set up branching logic to send students to the next question if they answer correctly, or to that question’s OOPS page if they answer incorrectly.
I used Screencastify to record the audio prompt for the correct answer of each question, post it as an unlisted video to YouTube, and then grab the link to add it to the question’s section in the Google Form. “Click the letter L. It starts the word laugh. (L sound), laugh. Laughing is good for you.”
I then used Screencastify again to make an introductory video to explain how to use the activity. I added this video to the very beginning of the form. Between this intro video and the read-aloud feature for each question, the activity is independent and self-paced for most students.
Finally, I tested out my form to make sure it worked properly and all the letters went to the right sections.
To try out one of the practice activities from this project, you can copy your own version from Teachers Pay Teachers as a freebie here: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Freebie-Capital-Letters-Practice-01-7448294