Phonics Play Dough

My two love playing with play dough so a simple way to make letter recognition /sound recognition fun for my two kids is to involve play dough. This play dough is from our City Activity Box and is perfect for using for his activity. This activity could also be changed to work for number recognition too. And can then also be extended so that your little one can start to make words in the play dough. Often children do not like putting pencil to paper but enjoy physically creating words so this is perfect for them!

Set Up

So for this activity I used our orange scented grey play dough from our City Activity Box. I also added some wooden letters that we had at home. It also works with the fridge magnet letters. I rolled the play dough out then stamped the letters into the play dough and removed them. Less than 5 minutes to set up and it’s ready!

Both girls were very keen to get stuck in. F however just wanted to add her own imprints of the letters as opposed to matching the ones I had already created. M started trying to match the wooden letters to the imprints. F had made it slightly trickier for her as she had flipped some of the letters over so they were in reverse or upside down. This therefore required M to really use some problem solving skills to try the letters different ways round.

Without me having to say anything, once M had matched all the letters, she wanted to make her own words with the letters. She made both real words and nonsense words. Making nonsense words is also useful for sounding out and blending.