I’d like to begin with sharing a way I found for kids to use magnetic letters. I have tons of magnetic letters in every size and color. I don’t use them much, until this year. In the past, I’d typically put them in centers where students copy words (maybe sight words) or maybe I’d have them making sentences. I’d supply them with one of my many buckets of letters. They’d spend more time looking for letters than making the words. I’m sure the kids had fun, but I never felt it was very productive.
I came up with something over the summer, which I love! I made these sheets (see below) with spaces for words they need to spell, and indicated on the sheets which letters they needed to use. Now instead of copying, they need to think, and it gives them practice sounding out simple words. The idea came to me while I was playing Mind Snacks on my i pad, learning Italian. There’s this fun game called “Word Birds” and the letters are there for you to spell the foreign words. It makes it so much easier to spell ‘diciassette’ when you have all the letters!
I also thought of an alternative to giving students a basket of letters. I’ll show you how I made it.
