Our little man is desperate to start reading.  He has actually taught himself most of the letters (the sounds not the names of the letters) and a few basic words but I want to make sure that he has a good grounding in phonics, so over the next few weeks I am going to be doing a number of posts on his letter and sound learning activities.

One of our favourite ways on learning letters and numbers is by using our sensory tubs and our magnetic letters (or numbers).  We have been using two different tubs with our letters, our bean tub and our button and bead tub.

We started off with our bean tub (it is a mix of corn, red beans, butter beans and kidney beans) and I hid some of the lower case magnetic letters in the tub.

Then I gave him the letter cards and he had to find the matching letters in the tub.  One of the reasons I love using our magnetic letters is so the kids can feel the shape of the letters.  This made a big difference with my daughter.  She use to like to pick up the letters and feel the shape before she would try to write them.

The letter cards that we used are FREE to download from trusty Twinkl.  I choose these ones as it includes the lower case and upper case letters and it has a nice selection of pictures to go with each letter.  I also like these as the font is consistent with the way in which he is learning to form his letters (one of the mistakes I made when my daughter was learning to write her letters was not keeping the font consistent and it did initially cause some confusion).

We have also used our button and bead tub.   This time I hide the upper case letters in the tub.  My daughter only learnt her upper case letters much later but with my son having picked up a lot from big sister he already seems to know most of the upper case letters hence I thought it would be good to include both for him to do.

My son enjoyed doing this and it was a good way of me checking which letters he knows and which ones he still battles with (apparently J and Y are causing some confusion).