Learning to read doesn’t always involve a book or a piece of paper! There are many, many fun ways to incorporate word work into your little one’s school time. This post will be an ongoing collection of many word play ideas, many of which I used while using my You Can Read program!
In no particular order, here are many hands on ideas for word play fun! Some are new ideas, some are ideas I used when I taught public school Kindergarten. Some are my ideas, some are ideas that have been passed down by teachers through the years!
Make words with small objects! Favorites are jewels {we have gotten ours at Dollar Tree and various craft stores}, and Learning Links. The possibilities are endless with this!
Take the idea a step further and challenge your child to find toys to make words out of! Here we used Twisters/Twister Curves… 
Stamp words! He was actually stamping Batman this day, but we also use them to stamp our sight words! {we just ordered these cool stamps, they aren’t here yet though!}
Which Word is Right? Mom ~ write 3 spellings of the sight word, only 1 correct. Have your child erase the wrong words, leave the correct spelling! Throw in a little healthy fruit snack as a treat for getting the answer correct!
Dry Erase Writing…Simply have your child write the word you call out on a dry erase board. Allow him/her to look at the word wall if needed to keep things positive!
Word Wall Search…Use a toy {Krash uses his favorite dolphin to jump} find the word you {or a helpful sibling} call out on the word wall!
Make the word with large foam letters from a floor puzzle {we got ours for $10 at Ross a few years back}. Krash is also using his dolphin to flip the ball down the word as he calls out the letters to spell and say the word!
Use small letter tiles {or abc magnets} to make words and a fun pointer to have your child point to the words you call out. Before starting this, you could also work with your child on putting the ABCs in order!
Roll & Read…Use an cube and an Education Cubes insert, having your child roll and read!
See how active this idea can really get!!!
Water paint the words outside on a warm day! Add in a cube for even more active play. Krash rolled the cube, ran to get it, ran back and painted the word!
Use the Leap Frog Word Whammer to spell phonetic 3 letter words. I thought it was hilarious that the whammer asked K to spell pub!
Lay out the words your child knows {ours are cut and laminated from our color by # cards}. 
Have your child roll the cube {or you can just yell out a word}, and toss a fun object/ball onto the correct word!
Make words out of play dough {I recommend this recipe}… 
Do you have an idea for word play fun?
Feel free to link up any idea that involves learning words in a fun, hands-on way! This is not going to be a weekly linky, just a large gathering of ideas in one place. You can come back and link up new ideas when you write posts about them! I will link to this Word Play post in each of my Kindergarten with Krash posts. Please Note ~ Links that do not share a family friendly reading idea will be removed in order to help others searching specifically for word play ideas!
