Sensory Phonics Ideas for Sand Trays: Sensory play is a fantastic way to engage young learners and promote their understanding of phonics concepts. Sand trays provide an interactive and tactile experience that can enhance children’s language development and letter recognition skills. In this blog post, we will explore creative sensory phonics ideas for sand trays that will captivate your kindergarten students and make learning phonics an enjoyable and memorable experience.
Sensory Phonics Ideas for Sand Trays
Check out these Sensory Phonics Ideas for Sand Trays. For many years, I have been using a sensory phonics approach to phonics using the Orton Gillingham approach. For 10 years, my county did allow each school to use different programs, but this year we ALL will be using Recipe for Reading. I made my sand trays for many years, so let’s dive into these sensory phonics ideas for sand trays. This is a great element to aid in teaching handwriting to dyslexics.
Letter Formation Fun
Use the sand tray to help students practice forming letters. Fill the tray with a thin layer of sand and encourage children to trace the shape of each letter using their fingers. As they trace, have them say the corresponding phonetic sound. This activity promotes letter recognition, fine motor skills, and phonemic awareness. You can check out the Orton Gillingham sand if you prefer that.
How to Make Sand Trays for the Classroom
Here is how you can make a class set of sand trays for sensory phonics. You will need good Thanksgiving-type plates, Sharpies in blue, red, and green, and a file folder or similar material to make a straight line. My idea was to add a blue line for the sky, green grass for the bottom, and a red line for the picket fence.
1. Add a blue mark across the top with the thick blue Sharpie to be the sky.
2. Then, I took the green markers and made the grass on the bottoms. I liked using both colors of green to make it look better.
3. The red fence was harder. I made them using a file folder with a slit cut-through for the red line.
This was time-consuming, but hopefully, something I will not have to do again any time soon. As my plates have been used for years and get a little more flimsy, I just stack a new plate under it for support and I am good to go. Since I made these for than 10 years ago, I think we are doing pretty well.
I added colored sand to the middle of the plate. I have to replace the sand from time to time, but overall
these are extremely LOW maintenance. Here is what the Sensory Phonics Ideas for Sand Trays look like when they are complete.
Incorporating sensory phonics activities using sand trays can greatly enhance the learning experience for kindergarten students. By engaging their senses and providing a hands-on approach, children can develop essential phonics skills in a fun and interactive way. These sensory phonics ideas, including letter formation, will make the sand tray a valuable tool in your classroom, promoting language development and fostering a love for reading and writing.
great ideas Mary! I love the idea of using a paper plate and coloring the sky and grass….great for orientation!! Thanks!
jeannie
Kindergarten Lifestyle
You are so creative! Love this idea!
Cheryl
Crayons and Curls
I just LOVE your sight word cards! They are AWESOME! How in the world did you create them???
I don't know about your question regarding which sight word list to go with. Does your new program (sorry, I'm not familiar with it) have any type of books that go with it? We have Open Court, and it comes with books – a set of pre-decodables that contain only sight words and a set of decodables with both sight words and words to blend. We pulled our sight words from these books. We suppliment with words necessary to help them when writing. I like to start with color words. Outside of their names, they actually symbolize something and the students are familiar with the concept of the verbal word (as opposed to the word "an" which is a word they can't actually hear being used in natural speech because it sounds the same as "a").
Markers: That's up to you. I used them my first year, and I had such a tough class that messed with them all the time that I had to take them away. Now I put them out only on special occasions. Most of the time we use highlighters. Office Depot has them the cheapest online in boxes of all one color.
Good Luck!
Suzanne
Caring4kinders.blgospot.com
I like the canvas idea for muscle memory! I am a special ed teacher and I have been using muscle memory for a year now and love it. It really helped a lot of my kiddos.
Recipe for Reading and Orton Gillingham philosophy are fabulous for teaching phoneme/grapheme skills. Use a piece of plastic crochet material under a piece of paper and when the kids write the letter it is "bumpy"…gives a great deal of proprioceptive feedback. Then they can take the paper off and trace with their finger to feel the letter as well.
Thanks for your comment Claired. The plastic canvas is that "bumpy material." So far, so good. I am not sure if crayons or markers are better… any insight into that?
I spent a week being trained in OG from the multi-sensory institute… They use Recipe for Reading. Crayons are used over the screen for words…
I spent a week being trained in OG from the multi-sensory institute… They use Recipe for Reading. Crayons are used over the screen for words…
I love this idea! I use saxon phonics in my Kinder classroom and struggle with ideas that will engage them! This is my first year as Kinder teacher and I am grasping for straws most of the time! Thanks for the ideas!
I think you should make a set of Fry words! I would love them!
Thank You! We are just beginning to use Orton-Gillingham. We are using crayons! 🙂
Is the red line supposed to be the halfway line that short letters should be under or used as the center of the letters they’re writing (as shown in the picture with the letter Cc)?
Thanks,
Kathy
It is the center line. I didn’t dot it because I wanted it to show as much as possible.