Home made count and color book

DIY ABC Dice and more

Homemade dice are so much fun and versatile!

Great for toddlers:roll the colors or shapes die and find the matching color/shape.
Great tool for reinforcing letter recognition: roll the upper case ABC die and ask the child to find the corresponding lower case letter.
Great as writing practice: roll any of the home made dice you have and ask the child to write down what comes up and see who comes out more often. Who will win first prize?
Also great for coins recognition and sorting.
Also good for numbers: roll the numbers die and ask the child to pick the corresponding amount of figurines, pawns, or any other item and write down the number.

Ice lolly book (Summer craft)

I used this idea both for my 4 year old, who can already read and write, and my 2 year old, and it worked for both of them.
I drew the shape on 2 sheets of cardboard paper, cut them out and used them as the cover and back of the ice lolly. Between them we added some white paper of the same shape and size and my oldest daughter used them to write what she likes the most about summer and then draw something that reminds her of summer. My youngest one instead colored some pictures I had made about summer and cut them out and glued them. Both of them decorated the cover with some Summer stickers. Then I stapled everything together and glued them onto a stick.

Drawing/Writing practice

I have these large sheets of paper that I use for painting on our easel but sometimes I like to surprise my kids and do something unusual, so we lay one of those sheets on the floor and use it for drawing and writing instead. I usually also provide my kids with a new set of crayons or surprise them, say, with a new batch of scented markers, so that they are excited about trying them. The fact that they are so big worked really well when my oldest daughter was 3 and I was teaching her how to write, because I used to give her lots of different tracing activities to do and the big size of the letters and drawings made it easier for her to reproduce.

DIY Picture cards

Letter U (Crystals)

DIY Summer Book

Bossy R poster

Writing practice with stencils

Valentine's heart... on a stick!

Now your child can have fun decorating it as he/she wishes! Go glitter! Hello stickers! Warning: it can get messy :)

Working on identifying and writing their name

For once, it's not homemade...

These are GREAT educational items that really help children learn to read and write. The one on the left comes from the UK, a dear friend of mine gave it to us as a gift. I had already prepared all those words myself years ago, but boy do these look better and do actually save a lot of time :)

Reading and writing practice

Both the wheel and the sticks can be very useful, whether you want to help your kids learn to read or write. Just have the child close their eyes and pick a stick and read or write the word on it or spin the wheel to find a word to read and write. Have them write it on a special notebook, one that they might have helped pick at the store, or write it on a dry erase board or on the easel. They can write it with special markers or stamps or with magnetic letters on the fridge.

Roll a sight word

Give your child a list of sight words and the number on the dice they correspond to. The child will roll the dice and write down the word they found.

Write a story

Your kid can just put the cards together or write them down as well, maybe in a special "My stories" notebook! Some can be pretty funny too!

More info here: This Reading Mama

R-controlled words poster

After making our own R controlled words books, here are some posters that my oldest kids updates every time she finds an r-controlled word in a book or even when we are speaking, basically anytime of the day:)

Opposites

My kids loved this song and kept singing it over and over for so many days! So I decided to come up with a game about opposites too! I would write one and my 4 year old was supposed to write the opposite and then it would be her turn. Great fun!

Writing books with your children

These are some of the books my oldest kid wrote herself! Great fun and great for reinforcement and reading too!

A book about body parts

 A book about vegetables