Hands-On Literacy Practice at Home : 3 Ways

As teachers, we know how important it is to give our students opportunities to practice literacy skills with their hands. This is done through sensory bins, centers, and more in our classrooms. We also know the importance of giving families the tools they need to continue practicing literacy skills at home. I’ve written before about how important a strong home-school connection is! Today, I want to share three at-home ideas for literacy skill practice. Our students have been home more than ever with distance learning. Additionally, long breaks like Spring Break and Summer Vacation are right around the corner. These ideas will freshen up the literacy work your families do at home!

Play Dough

Play Dough is the perfect tool to recommend to parents for literacy practice at home. Many families already have it lying around, and it’s easy for small hands to manipulate and form letters out of. Send home copies of word mats for families to keep on hand. Students can use play dough to build letters, words, shapes, and more!

Tracing Letters

For students who are working on letter formation, tracing letters is an easy skill to practice at home. This task can be made more fun simply by allowing students to use smelly markers, pens, paint, or any other fun, office supplies that families have lying around already. Practicing letters is something that you truly can not ask a student to do too often. The more practice, the better!

Build with Blocks

Small Legos, or other building blocks, make great manipulatives for building letters and words! They are highly engaging, because every kid loves the opportunity to play with some blocks. And, they are no prep! Simply have parents pull out the bin of legos they already have, and let students build!

If you want to save yourself some time, my Home Connection Alphabet Practice pages have these tasks and more built right into one page! Students will trace, build, color, and write in a single worksheet. This format makes it very easy for families to keep up with, and it makes it easy for you to copy and share! Grab your set of At-Home Printables in my TPT Store!

Happy Teaching, everyone!