Color by Letter Mystery Pictures, Alphabet Practice Worksheets PreK-1st Grade

About this resource

Read a letter. Find it in the key. Color the square. A picture shows up! This is a color-by-letter kit for early learners: six mystery pictures, each a grid with a letter in every square and a color key, plus the warm-up, circle-the-letter, writing and record-keeping pages around them. All 26 letters are used three ways: capitals, small letters, and a small letter in the square with its capital partner in the key. Every student answer is colored, circled or written in pencil or crayon, so no student page needs scissors or glue.

EVERYTHING INSIDE (33 pages)

• 6 mystery pictures (a kite, a rocket, an ice cream cone, a sailboat, a butterfly, a bus), each a 9 x 9 grid: 81 squares with a letter in every one, 486 squares in all
• 16 student pages in 5 page types: a practice tree, 6 Get Ready pages, 6 Mystery Picture pages, 2 Find and Color pages (12 rows of letters) and 1 Partner Letters page (12 letters)
• All 26 letters in each of three ways, 13 on one picture and 13 on the next: Pictures 1 and 2 use capitals in the squares and the key, Pictures 3 and 4 use small letters in both, Pictures 5 and 6 put a small letter in the square and its capital in the key
• Keys from 3 colors up to 5: one dot on the name line is a 3-color key (Pictures 1 and 2), two dots is a 4-color key (Pictures 3, 4 and 5), three dots is a 5-color key (Picture 6). The key prints each color name.
• 3 answer keys with the finished pictures, generated from the same data as the pages
• 1 tracker, 1 class progress grid, 1 team note page, 1 home page, 1 filled example (an invented student), 1 phrase bank (16 starters)
• 1 binder cover and 6 divider tabs with a spine label to cut out
• Start Here, a how-to-read-a-page page and a contents page that gives every page number

The Five Page Types

1. Practice tree (one dot): read the letter, find it in the key, color the box. A small tree is hiding in the squares, so a child sees the whole idea before the first mystery picture.

2. Get Ready: trace each key letter, then write it in a box with a dashed guide line. The letters are grouped by the color they will get, so the child meets them before they are in the squares.

3. Mystery Picture: read each letter, color its box like the key. Squares start white and the picture shows up when every square is colored.

4. Find and Color: six rows of six letters a page. Circle the letter that matches (the capital on the first page, the capital and the small letter on the second), then color the picture.

5. Partner Letters: twelve letters. See a capital and write the small one; see a small letter and write the capital.

Letters That Make A Child Look

Every letter is in only one color on a page, and the same letter never touches itself, up, down, left or right, so a child has to read each square instead of coloring a patch.

Built For The Child Holding The Page

A big "My name" line, one short instruction with a picture, large rounded letters, and squares big enough for a crayon. Nothing on a student page is written for an adult, and the level is dots, not words. The color names are printed in the key, so the pages still work when photocopied in black and white. The pictures are ordinary objects, drawn by us, with no characters and no faces.

A note on the pictures: each is a simple pixel drawing. If a child gives one a different name, say the word yourself.

Type In, Or Print

The name and date lines, the tracker, the class grid, the team note, the home page and the binder cover are type-in fields in any PDF reader. The letters a child writes in the boxes are crayon or pencil work. This is a fillable PDF; it is not a slideshow or a word-processor file.

Who This Is For

Preschool, kindergarten and first grade classrooms, self-contained and resource rooms, and any teacher working with an older student who is still learning letters. The home page sends the same job to a family; the team note hands off what changed since the last meeting.

What This Is, And What It Is Not

Letter practice with the record-keeping around it. It is not a probe, a goal bank or a score sheet, not an assessment, and not a claim about any student's age or rate of progress.