A little while ago I picked up a container of letter beads at our local craft store. At the time I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them but I knew they had the potential to come in handy for all sorts of fun literacy activities. Immy and I have used them to make the names of each of our family members and to make alphabet necklaces, and this week I thought they could provide a fun way of revising high frequency sight words that Immy is learning at school.
Threading onto pipe cleaners made the process of threading each letter much quicker than using wool or thread and helped to keep the focus on the word and it’s combination of letter sounds.
We talked about the differences between upper case and lower case letters and the often unusual sounds the letters make in many of the most common sight words.
And if you don’t have any commercially produced letter beads handy, you can easily make your own. Give your regular threading beads (ours were chunky, oversized plastic beads) a makeover by adding a letter to each bead with a permanent marker. If you don’t want the letter to be permanent you could also stick on a small dot sticker first and write the letter onto the dot.
Simple, right? And a great activity for giving little fingers a workout as well!
Looking for more sight word fun? Be sure to check out the ultimate list of playful sight word activity ideas here…
Christie Burnett is a teacher, presenter, writer and the mother of two. She created Childhood 101 as a place for teachers and parents to access engaging, high quality learning ideas.
Some great ideas! My son is bright but somewhat reluctant, so I’m always looking for bright ideas to keep him engaged in literacy and numeracy.
Wow what a great idea and so much fun. – Love this
Jack is really into writing and spelling at the moment. He always jumps into new interests with such gusto 😉 We don’t have any letter beads but the homemade ones look fabulous. They’ll love it.