Making Magnetic Words Activity

I figured many of you are home with the kiddos this summer and of course you need to throw in some learning fun – right?  Of course, it’s in our teacher blood!

What’s on your refrigerator?  I bet you have a set of magnetic letters on there! 

Are they holding up various works of art by your children? 

Let’s use them for learning fun!

Magnet Letter Lesson Plans for Home or School

Get all those letters together and use them for some learning fun. 

If you do not have a set, you can purchase them cheaply at the dollar store. 

If you do not have a magnetic surfaced refrigerator you can use a cookie sheet with the magnetic letters.  Look at all the learning that those letters can encourage:

ABC Blast Off:

Draw a simple rocket on a piece of paper.  Tape it to the magnetic surface.  Put the letters in ABC order next to the rocket. 

Go ahead and pull every five letters out of the order. Place the pulled letters under the alphabet.  

Tell your child that in order to make the rocket go, all the letters need to be in order before blast off. When they have all the letters back in place, sing the ABC song together to celebrate a successful blast off.

Find a Sound:

Children have a much easier time learning how to read if they know the sounds letters make.  You can practice this with the find a sound game. 

Place five letters onto the magnetic surface. 

Ask your kiddo, can you find the letter that says /b/?  Repeat until the child has given you all five sounds. 

Once your child has mastered five sounds move on to five new sounds.

You can also place five sounds on the magnetic service and say a word. Ask your child to find the beginning sound that word makes!

Speaking of sounds, Leap Frog makes a magnetic letter reader called the Word Whammer. This reads the letters and tells the sound made by each letter. My kids really did learn the sounds that letters make thanks to Leap Frog products. That is the truth!

Make One Into Many:

Show your kiddos the POWER of the LETTER S. It’s like SUPERMAN!

Throw a few easy-to-read words on a magnetic surface (mug, bat, cat dog, etc.) and show your kiddo how to make one into many with the POWER of S!

What’s in a Name:

Start by placing all the letters in your child’s name on a magnetic surface. Take away two letters and see if they can replace those two letters back in the correct spot. 

Next, mix up all the letters and see if they can put their name back together. 

Another fun activity is printing out your child’s name on magnetic paper. 

You can purchase magnetic paper and it goes right into your printer like regular paper. 

After you print a colorful version of your child’s name in large print onto the paper, cut it out to resemble a puzzle.  Have your child put their name back together on a magnetic surface.

Same Ending Work with some word families! 

Word families are a great way for emerging readers to learn that by taking away the first sound and adding a new beginning sound they can make many words out of the same ending!  

Start by putting ‘at- at the top of the fridge, and then put some consonants close by (c, b, h, m, r, s). Show how just by adding one little letter to the beginning of ‘at’, your child can now read six new words!

Spelling Sticks:

Are your older kiddos tired of going over those weekly spelling words? 

Spice it up and pull out the magnetic letters and use those to go over the weekly spelling list.  Your kids will be surprised how excited they are to practice their words a new way!

Hopefully this has made you look differently at the magnetic letters that decorate your refrigerator.

It’s amazing what those letters can do!

What else have you used magnet letters for in your classroom or at home? We would love to hear in a comment below.

Thanks for stopping by!

This post originally appeared at Organized Classroom.