ABC Order Letter Hop: Through the Bear's Honeycomb

A big honeycomb fills this page, made of hexagon cells, each holding one capital letter. A bear sits beside a green start circle with an arrow that points into the first cell. The run does not start at A: it begins somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, and the instruction names the letter where it ends. The other cells hold letters too, many of them close neighbours in the alphabet, so a careless hop leads the wrong way.

From the first cell, the child colors the next letter of the alphabet in a cell that touches it, then the next, and so on to the last letter. Starting in the middle is the challenge: it asks what comes after a letter without the help of singing from A. That is the alphabet knowledge first graders need for dictionaries, class lists and alphabetical order, practised one hop at a time. Only one chain of touching cells works, so the colored path is easy to check at the end.

The page prints as a PDF, works as a screen version where the child drags from cell to cell and presses Check, and comes with an answer key with the run shaded in. In the same family, the rocket maze and the small-letter maze under the sea practise the whole alphabet from the start, choosing at every fork. These are picture mazes with a story; square-grid mazes, dot-to-dot and word sorting have their own pages.