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Looking for creative ways to practice spelling and making words this month? Check out these quick and easy projects.

Pool Noodles

A friend of mine tagged me on this interactive learning post from Planning Playtime.   I loved the creativity of this project and I decided to give it a try. This craft was sure easy to adapt to my preschool, kindergarten and 2nd grade learners.  For my oldest, who is working with common word endings, I wrote her suffixes on a green pool noodle, vowels on pink and consonants on blue. She then used my equalizer sports bars to organize and spell her words. My middle girl, spelled words with blue (consonants) and pink (vowels) noodles and our youngest matched uppercase with lowercase letters.

My Takeaways:

  • Quick, easy and inexpensive to make

  • Find the pool noodles at Walmart or your local $ store

  • Use larger noodles; smaller ones tend to tear easy.

  • For ease of cutting noodles, use a serrated bread knife.

  • Only keep the letters out needed for your lesson. To many letters were scattered about and my kids struggled to stay on task.

  • Could use to string to form a giant word necklace

Legos

Another project I created was using large Duplex Legos to form words.  My oldest matched root words to suffixes.  Additionally these legos could be used for CVC or larger word blends.

My Notes:

  • Use an Expo or vis-a-vis to write words/letters

  • smaller Legos could be for patterns or additional word making activities

Clothes Pins

Another matching activity, that my oldest loved, was pinning the suffix on the root word.

  • Use masking tape to write letters onto clothespins so they can be reused.

  • Use cardstock or notecards, something with a bit more weight, to write the words. This will help the clothespins hold.