Create a fun and tactile literacy activity for kids with this dinosaur sensory writing tray! Great for pre-schoolers to school age children for mark-making, letter formation, learning to write their names and then onto sight words too! 
Here’s the latest in our Sensory Writing Tray series, with a fun dinosaur theme to appeal to all the dinosaur lovers out there! My girls love adding dinosaurs to small world play scenes or the block play area, and found this new sensory tray very appealing to get their fingers straight into and play with.
I mixed a couple of tablespoons of plain flour with some water which I had coloured green [using these Wilton gel food colours- the BEST for all play recipes like these!]
The ratio was about 1:2 for the flour and water, and we just mixed it until it made a consistency which was gloopy and thick, but runny enough to move when a finger was traced through it.
A thin layer of the dinosaur swamp goop was spread over the white, plastic tray [ours is a serving platter from the picnic section at the supermarket.]
Then we added some grass and some toys dinosaur figures.
My preschooler loved playing with the dinosaurs in the gloopy swamp mix, making them stamp and roar and watching the gloop stretch and drop from their feet! She then made lots of marks in the material, telling me that she was writing her name and making lots of sounds of letters that she has heard us saying often. A next step for her will be to offer her a name card with her name printed clearly on it, so she can begin to copy that with her fingers.
Miss 6 wrote me some words so that I could guess what they were and Miss 5 practised some of her sight words and 100 High Frequency words from her learning list. We have these magnets on the fridge to remind us what they are and they’re great for these types of activities!
They loved the feeling of this Sensory Writing Tray in their fingers and we are going to make it on a much bigger scale in our Tuff Spot in the summer time Watch this space for more gloopy, gloriously sensorial play and learning ideas coming up!
See all our SENSORY WRITING TRAY ideas here and our PLAYFUL LITERACY archives too!
What they are learning while they play:
literacy: recognising graphemes, linking phonemes and graphemes, practising name writing, learning sight words, reading and writing high frequency words
creativity: using figures and materials to create small worlds and imaginative play scenes
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