So, when I re-organized my Craft Store Room, I found this handy letter cards holder I made while studying. It was an assignment, and boy, did I hate making it! At that time I did not like a sewing machine(still not a big fan), and did not have the patience to learn to love it. BUT, with a little mommy-guidance I made this holder, and now I am using it in my work(finally)!
I do not have the original instructions(it is around 10 years ago I made this), but I do remember(sort of), and I took this ones measurements. So here goes, you will need:
- 2x material, sized 390mm x 390mm, leaving 10mm for hems
- Clear plastic, 380mm x 380mm
- Ribbon 130 mm long, around 10mm in thickness
- Thread
- Sewing machine
So basically you will sew the material back to back first. Folding it back, sewing the hem.
Then sew the ribbon on, making 6 blocks across, and 5 down. The blocks will be 55mm x 65mm. And some ribbon on the edges too.
Next sew the plastic on top of the ribbon, on all the ribbon, so it will make pockets. Lastly, cut the top of each block open with a craft knife to form pockets.
The back will look like this, and you can add two ribbons of about 100mm to close it up.
Like this:
And that is it, a lovely portable letter cards holder. Now you just need letters, laminate them and cut so it will fit into the pockets. I suggest at least 5 of each consonants and 8 vocals, so that you can build a few words, even sentences.
Here is how we used it this week:
I took a piece of craft foam and made it into 3 blocks. This week we only build 3 word letters, when we increase the number of letters/sounds, I will add more blocks.
We started with a simple word, eg. cat. We then changed up the beginning sound, making fat, then the ending sound, making car, and also the middle sound, making cot. Thus working on basic phoneme manipulation.
The students did well with these, and next we will move on to longer word. I need to make more cards for the different digraphs, trigraph sounds one gets in English and Afrikaans.
One could use these cards for practicing sight words, revision for spelling tests etc. One could make a game using the cards like we used magnets in the Spelling Game.
A great tool to have, and I love that it folds up so compact. Could keep the kids busy in the car too!
[…] students, one could simply start of with single letters of the alphabet, like we did in this Word building activity, working first with CVC’s, then CVCC’s etc. With older students, one could add multi […]