Montessori Sandpaper Letters: Learning Letters by Tracing Them

Maria Montessori published her book in Italian in 1909, and the English translation, The Montessori Method, appeared in 1912. It can be read today on Project Gutenberg. In it she describes how the sandpaper letters came about.

One October, Montessori was looking for material that would let children follow the shapes of letters with their hands. She could not get the fine letter models she wanted, and the whole month went by. Then she thought of cutting the letters of the alphabet out of sandpaper and gluing them onto smooth cards. As she and the teachers cut out letters after school, she writes, a clear vision of the method in all its completeness unfolded before her.

In this post I draw on Montessori’s own account to explain the idea behind sandpaper letters and how they are used, and then cover using them at home.

What sandpaper letters are

Sandpaper letters are single letters cut from sandpaper and mounted on boards or cards. The child traces each letter with a finger, following the same path as when writing it.

What Montessori valued was that the sandpaper guides the finger. She writes that if the child’s finger strays, the smoothness of the card immediately warns them of the error. The child can repeat the movements of writing as often as they like, without the fear of mistakes that a child writing with a pencil for the first time feels so keenly. That is the big difference from practising on paper.

Once they were used to it, she writes, the children loved tracing the letters with their eyes closed. They were learning letters not by sight, but through the touch of the fingertip and the movement of the hand. Montessori explains that when a letter is shown and traced, three sensations work together: the visual, the tactile and the muscular.

Teaching the sound, not the name

What is distinctive about sandpaper letters is that they teach the sound of a letter, not its name. In English, b is not “bee” but the sound the letter makes. Montessori writes that teaching begins with the vowels and moves on to the consonants, and that each consonant is joined at once with a vowel and repeated as a syllable.

Lessons follow a sequence known as the three-period lesson.

1. This is “a”. The adult traces the letter while saying its sound, and the child traces it too.
2. Show me “a”. Two or three letters are set out, the adult says a sound, and the child picks the letter.
3. What is this? The adult points to a letter and the child says its sound.

It is usual not to teach many letters at once, but to go two or three at a time.

Colours

In Montessori’s original description, the vowels were in light-coloured sandpaper on dark cards, and the consonants in black sandpaper on white cards. The letters were in the script then used in elementary schools.

Many sets sold today put vowels on blue boards and consonants on pink or red ones. Sandpaper numerals, traced the same way, are usually on green boards (Guidepost Montessori). It is sometimes said that the colours let a child see the different roles of vowels and consonants before they can be explained in words.

What research shows

In 2004 Florence Bara and colleagues in France published a study comparing two ways of teaching letters to five-year-olds: exploring them by sight only, and exploring them by sight and by touch. The children who also traced the letters improved more on a test of reading made-up words aloud. On a test of recognising letters, both groups improved by about the same amount.

The result suggests that tracing with the finger helps link the shape of a letter to its sound. That fits closely with what sandpaper letters have valued since Montessori’s day.

Sandpaper letters in other writing systems

Montessori schools in Japan also use sandpaper letters for hiragana. Many hiragana have more strokes than Latin letters, some strokes end with a stop, a hook or a sweep, and the direction of the pen changes several times within one character.

For characters like these, you can say the stroke order aloud while tracing, or trace one stroke at a time. Just as English sandpaper letters teach sounds, one idea is to say the sound of a hiragana character while tracing it.

Making them at home

Montessori made the first sandpaper letters herself, from sandpaper and card. You can do the same at home by cutting letter shapes from fine sandpaper and gluing them onto card.

There is no need to make the whole alphabet. A few letters, from the child’s name or ones they see often, are plenty. Make the letters large and put a small mark where each stroke starts, so the child knows where to begin.

Real materials and apps

The rough feel of sandpaper cannot be reproduced on a screen. Feeling through the fingertip that you have strayed from the letter, the most important feature of sandpaper letters, belongs only to the real thing.

An app, on the other hand, can show the stroke order one stroke at a time, offer thousands of characters, and keep the line you traced. One possible order is for a child to meet letters first with real sandpaper letters, and to add an app as the number of letters grows.

I compared real sandpaper letters with apps and other options in StudyX Smartpaper Letters vs Other Ways to Practice Handwriting.

About StudyX Smartpaper Letters

StudyX Smartpaper Letters is a tracing app for iPhone and iPad. Its store description presents it as a digital version of Montessori’s sandpaper letters. Classic sandpaper letters centre on the alphabet, while the app holds more than 10,000 characters, including hiragana, katakana, kanji, Chinese characters, the alphabet and numbers.

In practice, the first stroke of the model is drawn as an animation. When you trace it, the next stroke begins. When you finish the last stroke, you get a score based on how closely your lines overlap the model. It works best with an iPad and Apple Pencil, but you can also write with a finger. If you want to trace with a finger as with sandpaper letters, writing with a finger is a good choice.

With the Montessori Style setting (on by default), when you practise a single letter of the alphabet, vowels have a blue background and consonants a red one. Numbers, and kanji numerals such as 一 and 十, have a green background. Hiragana, katakana and other kanji are not coloured. When the setting is on, the model stays visible after you finish writing. Turning on Cursive Alphabet lets you practise the alphabet in cursive. Montessori’s first sandpaper letters were in script, too.

It is a one-time purchase with no ads and no in-app purchases, and what you write is not sent anywhere.

For a first session, see Getting Started with StudyX Smartpaper Letters. For routines, see Tips for Practicing with StudyX Smartpaper Letters.