Play Dough and Alphabet Beads Activity

This play dough and alphabet beads activity is a hands-on way to explore letters, develop fine motor skills and learn sight words!

Play dough is a favorite for both of my kids, so we play with it often. We have used all kind of play dough tools and manipulatives while playing with it, but never thought to use alphabet beads. That is until a couple of days ago.

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I was grabbing the play dough from the closet and our favorite alphabet beads were sitting right next to it. Then it hit me that we should add the beads to our play dough play time!

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There is no set up required for this one. Just put the beads and the play dough on a tray and let your kids have at it.

Learning with Play Dough and Alphabet Beads

To begin, I just let my kids explore the letters and the play dough any way they wanted. They hid beads in play dough balls and stuck beads all over piles of play dough.

As they were playing, my son discovered that the beads could be used to stamp the play dough. I thought it would be a great way to work on sight words and he was game.

I would think of a simple CVC word like “can” and “map.” He would sound it out to find each individual letter needed to spell the word and then place them in order in the play dough. After that, he would pull the letter beads up carefully to reveal the stamped word in the play dough.

If your children aren’t ready to spell words, that is perfectly fine. It is still lots of fun to stamp letters in the play dough! My toddler was perfectly happy doing this the whole time and I used it as an opportunity to mention letter names while we played.

I love that this can be a simple open-ended invitation to play with letters or a more structured activity that is used to teach sight words. Either way, it is lots of fun!