DIY Herbal Play Dough for Phonics

Teaching kids to read is so much fun, isn’t it? I’m currently teaching my fourth daughter to read, and it’s definitely time well invested. It’s so fulfilling for me to watch my older girls avidly read good books and opening up whole new worlds of learning and adventure, knowing I played a large part in helping them to be good readers. I enjoy watching my youngest on the same path to enjoying good books. I always look for ways that I can make school interesting and even fun when I can. Teaching phonics gives way to creative opportunities for fun, and herbal play dough is one way to do just that!

You can use your herbal play dough in several ways to teach phonics. Here are a few suggestions:

• Use cookie cutters to cut out letters. Go over the names and the sounds of the letters. If your child gets a letter right, allow her to smash the letter into a ball. If she misses one, set that letter aside to practice again. Keep going until all of the letters have been smashed! (If you have a very young child or if your child has a short attention span, just cut out a few letters to use at each sitting. It may be too overwhelming and discouraging to do all 26 letters at once time!)
• Use the same cookie cutters to cut out letters to make short words. (Again, you may want to just use a few letters at a time instead of using all 26 letters.) You could, for example, cut out the letters h and t. Then cut out the vowels. Using these two consonants and the vowels, you can practice words like hat, hit, hot, and hut. You could even practice nonsense words like het just for fun and to reinforce the short vowel sound between two consonants.

Click HERE where I’m sharing the recipe at Hip Homeschool Moms!