Building Word Families with Bread Ties

Spelling with bread ties is a fine motor literacy activity that reviewed the word families our daughter has been learning while reusing a material most people throw away! We've furthered the learning with a math game with bread ties. 

We saved our bread ties for several months before this idea came to me. I just knew we could reuse these plastic squares for something (or probably several activities). You could ask your friends and family to save their bread ties for you to accumulate a collection quickly.

E has been working on reading and spelling with word families. I took a Sharpie and wrote a letter on the back of each bread tie. I attempted to make the vowels a different color than the consonants but I did run out of colors. It didn't seem to matter other than the color coding helped the vowels stick out a bit more as she was searching for a certain letter.

We used play dough as a stand for our letter manipulatives. You could move these around on a table top like Scrabble pieces but sticking the letters into the dough required a bit more fine motor action. 

We practiced both reading and spelling CVC words. For reading I put the letters in the dough then asked E to sound out the sounds to read the word. We practiced both real and nonsense CVC words (like tog, nud, and det) because both are important emergent reading skills!

For spelling we would start with one word such as tip. I would ask E to change the word to spell something else by only moving one letter.

"How can you make tip into top? What letter do you need to change to make top into bop?"

For added practice you could ask your child or students to write the word chain of all the words they make by switching only one letter!

This post is part of our Fine Motor Fridays series.
Read these other creative fine motor posts from my blog colleagues:

Fall Leaf Punch Collage from Craftuate

Contact Paper Doll Dresses from Lalymom

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