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The Letter M & D Pack

M is for mushroom, D is for duck: giant M and D to trace, a hunt for hilltops, moss and a D-shaped moon, tracing and stick-building for M, m, D and d, and an M-or-D sound sort. Ages 2 to 7.

Ages 2–7 · 7 pages · About 10 min a page

Download free LetterA4 · PDF

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First page of The Letter M & D Pack

M is a sound you can hum with your lips closed, and D is a quick tap of the tongue. That makes them a lovely pair for little ones: easy to hear, easy to feel, and very different at the start of a word. This pack starts with two giant letters to finger-trace and fill with leaves or pebbles, M with its two mountain tops and D with its straight back and round curve.

Then it heads outside. Children look for a mushroom (to look at, never to pick or touch), soft moss, two hilltops that make an M, a bird with its wings spread like an M, a moon shaped like D and a stone with one flat side, plus a surprise find to draw. A short note for grown-ups explains that the mushroom is only a small part of a fungus, and that in the northern half of the world a D-shaped moon is growing.

Back at the table, children trace big M, little m, big D and little d from a dot with a ring, write their own, and build an M from four sticks and a D from a stick and a bendy twig. The last page sorts six pictures by first sound (mushroom, duck, moon, dandelion, mouse, dolphin). Every page has an easier and a stretch idea for ages 2 to 7, and it all prints on Letter or A4.

What’s inside

  1. 1Cover: what’s inside, what you’ll need and an M & D hunt log
  2. 2Before you start: the two sounds, three ways to play and mushroom safety
  3. 3My giant M: down, diagonal down, diagonal up, down, then decorate
  4. 4My giant D: down, then a big round curve, then decorate
  5. 5M and D are hiding outside: mushroom, moss, hilltops, bird, moon and stone
  6. 6Trace M, m, D and d, then build them from sticks
  7. 7M or D? First-sound sort with draw-your-own boxes

Why this matters

Hearing the first sound of a word and matching it to a letter you can trace, build and spot outside is how early reading begins. M and D feel very different in the mouth, a hum and a tap, so they are easy to tell apart, and finding their shapes in hills, birds and the moon makes them stick.

Age bands

Every activity page has an easier and a stretchier way in, marked with these bands:

  • Sprout 2–3
  • Seedling 3–5
  • Sapling 5–7

Letter is the standard paper size in North America; A4 is used almost everywhere else.