Hands-on spelling and reading activities are helpful to students who have difficulty with reading and spelling. There are activities that students can do to focus on specific skills that will improve their reading and spelling ability. These skills can be to identify certain vowel sounds in a few sentences, or to create and build words by word families. Students enjoy activities like word hunts and reading with a hand-held mirror to mimic mouth formation pictures for the right sound to be produced.
Using the hands-on spelling and reading activities listed below will make students enjoy learning to read and spell. Students learn everything easier when they get to use their hands to interact with what they are learning about in a concrete way. It also helps them to remember what they learned.
I love to find helpful teaching tips. As an Amazon affiliate, I may earn a commission for purchases using my links. The ideas and paid links below are based on hands-on tools that your students can use to practice reading and spelling in a fun way.
Hands-on Spelling and Reading Activities
These activities can be doing word hunt activities, using word puzzles, making phonics crafts, using word wheels, reading with a mouth mirror, and reading with phonics phones.
Hands-on Spelling Activities for Students
Word hunt activity for spelling and word association: I got this idea from a parent of a first grader, but it can work for the classroom. These letter shaped beads are used for this activity. She hides the letters in an Easter egg (or something else) and her seven-year-old finds the egg, puts the letters in order to match a word the parent wrote on the spelling sheet. Then the child writes the same word (on her own) next to where it was already written.
Wooden short vowel reading word puzzles: This set is great for making short vowel words which are shown on picture cards. Each card spells a word and the other side shows a picture. There are consonant letter tiles that students can place before and after the vowel plate to make words. This spelling activity set is great for visual learners and tactile learners.
Phonics Crafts for students: Students love making crafts, so why not have them make crafts for phonics? In this phonics activities and crafts blog post, I share pictures of phonics crafts that my students created, with my help.
Elkonin Boxes Magnetic Dry Erase Box Sets: These dry-erase Elkonon boxes are great for practicing decoding and encoding words. They wipe off very well and I love that they are magnetic. Use them to place magnetic pictures down and have students sound the words out.
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Phonics Pocket chart with letter cards: This set comes with a generous amount of letters and phonics-building cards, which makes it usable for more than preschool and Kindergarten levels.
Hands-on Reading Activities for Students
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Use a phonics mirror with pictures of mouth formations: This Hand 2 Mind Mirror – My Sounds Phoneme Set can be used to have some visuals to help students to produce a variety of speech sounds. It includes phonics cards in a holder with a mirror, and a handbook with game instructions for the hands-on spelling and reading activities. The cards have phonic sounds and pictures of the mouth to show the formation positions of the lips and tongue for these sounds. Speech therapists use this in their practice. There is also the Hand2mind Talking Mirror My Sounds Phoneme Set which can play the sounds for the students to mimic.
Color coding word sounds with Bingo chips: Students can use translucent Bingo chips in assorted colors to identify certain vowel sounds in the text they are reading. Assign a different color chip for each sound, for example, putting orange chips on words with the long ‘I’ sound.
Word Wheels: Words wheels are one of the best hands-on spelling and reading activities because they make reading fun. Each wheel targets a specific word family. These are great for beginners who can identify letter sounds but need practice with merging the sounds together to form words. I have a collection of word wheels that are illustrated with pictures. There is a free sample word wheel which is great for reading words in the ‘_at’ family. See the full collection here.
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Phonics Phones for students: These are phonics phones used for independent reading so that students can hear themselves read. To make phonics phones, you will need cuts of PVC pipe and elbows, colorful duct tape for the middle part, solvent cement, and spray paint. You can use store-bought phonics phones instead. Both types of phones can be stored in a clear or translucent pocket chart, that is numbered with number stickers, to match the phonic phones to student numbers. The third one is called a Phone Buddy. It is a great tool to use in reading intervention programs or with any kiddos who need to work on oral language skills.
Attach mirrors to their clipboards: This is a reading toolbox strategy for reading instruction for younger students. Students’ reading material is clipped to the top of the clipboard and at the bottom of the clipboard is the plastic mirror. Use a shattterproof plastic mirror for this.
Use finger pointer highlighters for isolating individual words: If your students feel overwhelmed by the amount of words they have to read on a page, the use of a finger focus highlighter can be helpful. It can help students to focus on a group of words at a time. This would build confidence for reading a books with full pages of text in them.
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Use reading guide highlighter strips: The colors on these highlighter strips are easy to read through and they make tracking easier, and more fun.
Go fishing for sight words: It’s fun to have games to review and learn becausre it shakes things up especially for home school. This Go Fish Game os good practice for lots of sight words and practicing reading. The fish are light weight and they stick well to the fishing pole magnet end.
Hand2Mind Reading Readiness Set for Kindergarten: This activity set is perfect for small group phonics lessons. The magnetic wand is a fun and interactive way for students to practice the skills on the cards.
I hope this has helped you find hands-on spelling and reading activities for your students. You may also be interested in this blog post about how you can make spelling tests for your students.
Check out this list of fun phonimic awareness activities for students.
Here are related blog posts about reading in the classroom:
How to Encourage Reading with a reading tree and book reports
See related phonics blog posts here:
GH and GHT Phonics Word Wheels
Free CH Word Wheel with foldable worksheet
