If you are looking to DIY your own phonics resources, here are five simple ways that you can create your own alphabet manipulatives.
1. COLOURED BALLS
I write our sounds (single sounds and simple digraphs) on coloured balls. The kids then make decodable words in muffin trays. By colour-coding the vowels, consonants and digraphs, this reduced the kids wasting time looking for each ball.
Below are some coloured balls from Amazon (I love the pastel ones!)
2. VELCRO SPOTS
These velcro spots were great for consolidating automatic sound recall, and word-building activities.
You could make your own with some plain velcro sit spots, and a sharpie!
3. UNIFIX CUBES
I made my own phonics unifix cubes by writing on plain cubes with a sharpie. I colour coordinated for consonants, vowels, and digraphs.
4. DRY ERASE WORD BUILDING BLOCKS
I purchased these connector blocks from Kmart Australia. I then used whiteboard tape to make it easy for students to write the sounds and decodable words as they build them. The larger blocks are great for representing digraphs e.g. th, sh, ll, ck.
This dry erase tape could be used on so many different materials to make resources have a write and wipe element!
5. SENSORY SOUND STONES
Simply print and cut pictures, letters or numbers and apply to the stones using Mod Podge (an all in one glue and sealer).
Watch a reel to see how I create my own stones.
My sensory stone templates are available as a free download here.
Below are the resources that I use to create the stones: Mod Podge and Tuscan Path White Aztec Pebbles.
