DIY Literacy Materials

This is a repost from my personal blog. Our Literacy Coordinator thought it might be helpful to some of the parents! If you attended Jeri Reed’s Reading Workshop a couple of months ago, you’ll recognize some of these ideas. 🙂 This will probably make more sense if I clarify that I’m a Literacy Tutor at the McHenry Playhouse and I also homeschool my own kids.

This is a salt/sand box. Basically you take a box (I had a wooden box from the thrift store with a lid), paint the bottom black and fill with salt or sand. I’ve let Jeremiah (3) do his own explorations with the box and he has done letters in his name, footprints with his plastic dinosaurs and most recently, stamped letters into the sand with magnetic letters from the fridge. It’s a great pre-writing tool and it’s fun for working on words we’re learning as well.

Speaking of magnetic letters… This was another idea I got from one of the special ed teachers who volunteer at GiGi’s… This was another box I had laying around which happens to be made of metal so I filled it with a bunch of magnetic letters which they can arrange on the lid inside or outside. They take it in the car, they sit and make up their own nonsense words for a good giggle (a great way to introduce phonics!)… the possibilities are endless on this one.

This is my robot word-eater. I made him for my kids and my students. I painted a box and cut a hole for the mouth and grabbed a stack of cards from a Memory game that no longer had all the pieces. I wrote words on the backs of the cards so we can play different variations. Robot wants to eat the word that starts with “b.” Robot wants to eat the word “bear,” can you find it? The picture cue is nice to have so if the child is having trouble, they can self-check so there’s no wails of, “I don’t knoooooow!!!!” So far, he’s been a welcome guest with my boys and at my literacy sessions. The best part is, of course, turning him over and dumping him out after his meal.

These are little books I’ve made out of those flashcards you can find at Wal-Mart, Target, etc. I divided them into categories, “Things We Wear” and such and punched holes in the corners, threw a book ring around them and then printed a list of the words on cardstock and cut them up. The books are small and fun to look through and you can do lots of matching and labeling with the cards and words. For instance, in the first picture, I’d say, “This card says, ‘boot!’ Can you find the word that says ‘boot’? Can you match it?” and it’s relatively simple to find the word that looks the same. Instant success. After a while, you flip the cards over to the other side and have them match without the pictures. I find a lot of times, the kids will, before I say what the word is, read the word to me. I don’t have to ask, I’m not testing, they just tell me when they know it.

These are some more flashcard books I made from recycling card games that no longer have all the pieces. Goodwill, garage sales… these places have a ton of flashcards and game cards that could be repurposed this way. The kids love having these little books around to flip through. If they are reading from the picture side, the visual cues are enough so that they can read the book to me without help… It’s such a pleasure to see the satisfaction on their little faces. After a while they flip to the other, pictureless side and find they know many of the words by sight just from reading the little book over and over.