Word Building Activity with Letter Blends Rock Letters

Beginner readers are so much fun!  It is very exciting to see Big Sister learn and grow in her reading skill as this year goes by.  She is doing really well with her reading, and more importantly, developing a love for reading.  This word building activity was a fun way to practice some of her new decodable reading skills using letter blends. 
What are letter blends??  You know those letter combinations that (mostly) begin and end words… tr, ch, sh, qu…those are letter blends!  We made these word building rocks and have been having a blast building words, sounding them out, and building more words!
rock letter manipulatives for new readers to build words

Word Building for Beginner Readers

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I picked up a bag of these black river rocks
and used a
paint marker
to write the letters.
These rocks are awesome for play and learning.  I’m thinking we may do a math set of rocks and an upper case/lower case letters set too.  There are so many learning possibilities with these sets!

Letter Blends Activity

Once the paint dried, we had nice bright letters on the black rocks, and got started with our word building.  Big Sister used the rocks to sound out the letter blends and built tons of words.

This is such a great activity for beginner readers.  Hands on learning is more fun…and seems to make the concepts “stick”. 

We even used the letters with Little Guy, who is working on identifying lower case letters.  He liked playing with these rocks, too and had fun naming the letters.  We’ll be pulling our letter rocks out again soon, and maybe adding them to the sandbox with a few construction vehicles, into a bin of corn for sensory play, or…the possibilities are endless!!

looking for ideas for your beginner reader?  Try some of these.  They are fun learning activities…kid tested!