Letter Clouds with Playdough Activity
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Playdough together with letter beads provides all kinds of fun learning opportunities. This Letter Clouds with Playdough Activity can be used to practice multiple skills such as letter recognition and building fine motor muscles. We used our blue playdough and letter beads to make “clouds,” imprinting and sorting vowels.
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Letter Clouds with Playdough Activity
Playdough is great for combining hands-on fun with learning important skills. My learners needed more practice in differentiating between vowels and consonants.
We flattened blue playdough and then used letter lacing beads to imprint the letters. That is when one child remarked that they looked like clouds – hence, we called them letter clouds! I suppose you can use a different color playdough and call them letter pancakes or anything really.
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After each learner flattened five playdough balls into “clouds,” they had to pick out the vowel beads from the consonant beads. Letter knowledge and visual discrimination skills are at work here. (You don’t have to use letter beads though – letter stamps, letter cookie cutters, or magnetic letters could work too.)
Each vowel was assigned to a “cloud.” The sound of each vowel was practiced orally. Then, I said a word – for instance, ‘cat’, and the children had to imprint/stamp the correct vowel onto the correct cloud.
Identifying the sound and matching it to the correct bead is an example of phoneme and grapheme correlation, which is very important when learning to read and write.
We went through many familiar CVC, CVCC, and CCVC words as we filled our clouds.
Using playdough added a sensory element to this literacy activity, and we know that children learn best when the learning involves more than one sense (multisensory learning).
You can also use this activity to sort consonants or spell words by imprinting the words in the playdough. Your little learners will love it!
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