Make a soccer sensory writing tray for a super fun way to practise letters, sounds, name writing and sight words in a hands on way! Great for football/ soccer fans and sports lovers and for using in a classroom setting to appeal to a wide range of learning styles!
If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that we are working our way through an ongoing series of sensory writing trays with a wide range of seasonal and fun, topic based themes. You can check out the entire collection here for loads of ideas to save up for the future! There are many to suit each interest and hopefully to provide all kids with plenty of fun ways to practise those letters and sight words over the years ahead!
We made this football/ soccer sensory writing tray during the European Cup which is a huge deal here in the UK (and incidentally made me a football widow again for a few weeks!)
For this set up we used a gorgeous, mirror-lined tray (I found this in Tiger as a cosmetics tray) which is so tactile and inviting to touch. The mirror base shows up as soon as you trace your finger across it and that adds a fantastic contrast and sensory element.
We used some dyed salt with added glitter and made a thin enough layer that the bottom would show up when traced into.
Then I cut some circles from card and made some simple ABC cards and sight word cards, adding some half pentagons around the edges to make them look like foot balls/ soccer balls.
We popped in a football eraser, mini balls, football boot finger kicker (this was fun!) and a little trophy too.
Miss 4 used the tray to write her name and also to work on letters from the first phonics group SATPIN. Once she has mastered those phonemes she can already work on putting them together to create and read small, CVC words such as SAT, PIN, NAT, TAP, TAN, NIP etc.
The older girls practised sight words, high frequency words and tricky words that I picked out of some of their current reading books. Miss 8 also asked me to choose some difficult words at random and call them out for her to write independently.
As with all of these trays, they can also be used for writing numbers, practising calculations and simply for drawing and mark making too! This would be great in a football/ soccer themed corner of the classroom alongside other ball learning resources e.g. numbered ping pong balls, a basket ball counting game and soccer top trumps. 
If you like this soccer sensory writing tray then please consider sharing it! Thanks 🙂
You can find our whole SENSORY WRITING TRAY series here.
And a huge selection of other, PLAYFUL LITERACY ACTIVITIESÂ here, including storytelling, poetry, rhyme, writing, reading and phonics.