Learning Through Play Phonics Activities

My favorite way to teach my children is through play. The kids get excited that mom is ‘playing’ with them, while Mom gets excited that they are actively learning at the same time!! It’s a win win for everyone. Check out these learning through play phonics activities to see how you can teach your child without worksheets!

I am a blog ambassador for Lakeshore and am compensated for my work. I received product free of charge, but all thoughts and opinions are 100% mine.

In the Montessori method, letters are not actually introduced by their verbal name. They are introduced by their letter sound. This makes it easier for a child to learn to read later on. While I do work on the alphabet letter names such as, “A, B, C, D” I am also introducing the sound each letter makes.

Build an Alphabet Letter

A good way to teach your child to recognize letters and their sounds is to actually make them put the letter together. This way they take notice of the lines and curves each letter has, which is a pre-writing skill.

We will be using Lakeshore’s Magnetic Letter Builder in my 3 year old’s weekly letter of the week activities. I love that everything we need to build a letter is conveniently in the box and it is a great way to work on letter recognition as well as letter formation skills.

We started off with the letters she knew and then progressed to letters she didn’t already know.

Let your child guide their learning

She wanted to do all the letters at once that first day and although that wasn’t how I had planned the activity to be.. I allowed her to guide her own learning. By following a child’s interest you allow them to take charge and in this case, I didn’t interrupt her own learning and interests. Self motivation also makes a child more eager to want to do more learning activities in the future.

Since she enjoyed the letter builders so much we will probably revise the letters she knows each week and then work on a new letter.

We often do play dough alphabet letter mats but that can sometime’s be a bit messy. We love the ease of use for this activity!

Play And Learn With Alphabet Rockets

Subconsciously, our brain takes in everything we see. So visual reminders and toys that catch their interest make it easier to recognize letters and their sounds.. Lakeshore’s Alphabet Rockets is perfect for this!

My daughter really enjoys using her Number Alphabet Rockets, so I knew she would have a ‘blast’ with this one too! Besides working on her letter sounds, the rockets function as an amazing toy too!

To set up this activity I took out five alphabet letter rockets. Each alphabet letter’s rocket uses the same color. I wanted my daughter to focus less on the color and more on the actual words so I added in an extra blue colored rocket to keep her mind active.

Whether you use them with the visual color clue or not, make sure that your child actually looks at each image and says it out loud to you. Remind your child to say the name of each image and then to look at the matching alphabet letter it is with.

I love that the color clue provides a way to self check their rocket.

Learning with a magnetic board

When I posted an Instagram story with my daughter doing this fun magnetic activity, many of my followers sent me a message asking for more information about it. She was giggling and having so much of fun with it. It is important to make learning fun!

The Self Checking Magnetic Cards with the Magnetic Board is a very unique way of working on those alphabet letter sounds, vocabulary words and phonemic awareness. You place a card in the Magnetic Board slot and then your child has to place a star on the correct answer. Once she is done she can check her work by pressing the green button. This is where the magic is found! If your child’s answer is wrong, once she presses the green button the wrong answer stars will fall. If her answers are correct, none of the stars will fall.

This activity led to SO many giggles!!

When my 8 and 10 year old saw her doing this activity they wanted a turn too!

When we had gone through the alphabet cards I had a look through the set to see what else would be age appropriate for my daughter. I noticed the sight word cards in the Self Checking Vocabulary box and gave it a try. Sight words aren’t memorized because a child reads the word, they are memorized by just looking at the visual word.

She was easily able to match the vocabulary words too!

I am so happy that whenever I need educational and fun activities I can go to my local Lakeshore Learning store and walk in knowing that Lakeshore offers innovative educational toys, games and materials that are built by teachers and loved by kids.

I have the Self Checking Magnetic Language Cards Full Set and this set is definitely going to grow with her interests and learning level.

Learning through play is the best way to teach a child, especially in preschool. Our goal is to set a lifelong love for learning and I am glad Lakeshore creates products that help me reach that goal!