Spelling dice

So, we've had fun throwing our letters out of the window this week, running around the kitchen making 'o' and 'i' shapes with our fingers. It's grabbed the kids' imaginations and the apostrophes are in the right place, even if the remaining letters aren't!!

While preparing for a session with parents tomorrow I came up with a dice idea for reinforcing spelling too. By printing out a cube net and drawing or writing different words, letters and pictures on each side before sticking together, we can play all sorts of games with our children. I'm not sure how the parents tomorrow will react to my drawings of animals, designed to get nursery age children recognising and making animal sounds, and reception age children spelling cat, dog (it's hard to draw a recognisable dog!) and pig. But hopefully they'll get the idea. Children will enjoy making their own - giving them a letter on each face they can name a work that begins with each letter. As they progress to more complex sounds, write 'ch', 'sh' or 'th' on the faces and ask them for a word that begins or ends with these sounds as they roll the dice. Or, as I made for my kids, 'have not', ' did not' and 'do not'; the question being how do you spell the contraction, or shortened version of the words?

Here's a link to website that will let you print a cube net (and other 3D shapes too if you're interested) to make your dice. Have fun, and feel free to share your ideas about what you write on each face and how you get on!