Letter Rescue

At the moment we are working hard to try and help my son write his own name. Part of this process is doing lots of simple and fun letter recognition activities.

The set up.

What you need:

- some sort of laundry basket with holes in the sides

- ribbon or string and scissors

- tongs

- small letters (we used magnetic ones from Toys R Us but wooden blocks or even just written paper letters would work fine)

- paper and marker for writing names on

Step 1: Making the web

I actually hadn't intended for my son to help with this part but he saw me making the web and wanted to help cut and thread the ribbon. To make the web all you need to do is cut some long pieces of ribbon or string and thread it through the holes in the basket. I started off doing this lengthways and then weaved through different pieces widthways. 

You can vary the number of pieces of ribbon to determine how challenging the web is.

Cutting and threading the web.

Step 2: Rescuing the letters in his name

Once my son saw the set up he was eager to reach in and grab the letters at the bottom of the basket. I wanted to make it a bit more challenging so I told him that he was not allowed to use his fingers and had to rescue the letters using the tongs. He enjoyed trying to carefully pull out the letters without them getting caught on the ribbon.

Rescuing the letters.

Step 3: Spelling his name

As my son rescued each letter I asked him to tell me what the letter was and to place it in the correct spot on the paper. To make it more challenging you could just give your child a blank piece of paper so that they have to demonstrate the correct order of lettering (we aren't quite at that stage yet). 

I put upper and lower case letters in the basket but you could also throw in some letters that aren't in your child's name as well.

Spelling out his name.

Step 4: The end product and an extra challenge

I was really impressed with how engaged my son was with this activity and he was proud every time he spelled out the letters in his name. He then asked if he could try and do it with Mummy's name so I wrote out my name and my husband's name and we repeated the process. 

This required a little more support in terms of him verbally repeating the letters but he used the written names to compare each letter to that he rescued.

The end product.

An extra challenge.