Make some gorgeous alphabet pebbles for literacy play games for both preschoolers and older school aged kids! A truly versatile literacy resource to use at home, in the classroom and give as a perfect gift too!

DIY alphabet pebbles for literacy play:

Making your own resources, games and gifts for kids is really satisfying and especially so when they’re as simple and easy as these alphabet pebbles! We first made a simple version of these a few years ago and more recently we added some brightly coloured number rocks to the collection. You can take a look at those and the suggested numeracy play games that we use them for here.

Using the same, flat and smooth pebbles as for our number pebbles, I simply wrote one letter of the alphabet onto each one, using the same fabulously colourful Posca paint pens. These are great because they have a thin nib and are as easy to control as a marker pen, which is brilliant!

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Once dry, I sealed over the top of each one with a coat of clear varnish, which made them shiny and the colours even more vivid too. We popped them into a basket and set them onto the shelves for playtime!
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As with all good quality, open-ended resources, these alphabet pebbles can be used in a whole host of ways to suit the different ages and stages of those playing with them. Best of all, let them choose what to do with them!

For example, they are very easy to use to learn names and how to spell them out in correct order. Simply make the extra letters you might need on top of the standard 26 from the alphabet. Kids love to learn the names of family members after they’ve mastered their own too!

For Miss 4 we had fun matching the alphabet pebbles to letters written on paper, and then stepped that quickly onto matching to create CVC words too. She loved sounding them out one letter at a time to see what magic word she had created!

For children who are already secure with all of their phoneme-grapheme correspondences, you could call out letters to find in a treasure hunt, then ask them to put them together and read what they’ve made. If they point to each one as they make its sound they can then simply blend them together to create the word.

Older kids can use the alphabet pebbles to start building sight words from the tricky word lists (these are often sent home from school or findable online by searching for KS1 and KS2 high frequency word lists.)

The more they practise making and reading these words independently, the sooner they will learn them by heart. And this is a MUCH more fun way to do that than by writing them out on paper!

Miss 7 wanted the challenge to build much bigger words too, even asking for words from her current Harry Potter book to be picked at random for her to try and spell out! Again, creating some extra vowels for these kind of spelling activities is really handy.

These alphabet pebbles are a lovely, tactile and engaging literacy play material and look lovely in a basket on the play and learning shelves, ready to be used in any free play activity. They’d also work well in the sand or sensory play tub, or even with magnets attached to the back and on display on the fridge!