Make a Star Wars sensory writing tray for an inter-galactic writing adventure for kids! What a fun way to learn letters and sounds, as well as write your name and begin to write sight words too! 
This next instalment in our Sensory Writing Tray series is for Miss 6 who is wholly obsessed with Star Wars and all its related characters. She had a special Star Wars themed party this year and spends a lot of her time dressed up as Rey, ready to take on the enemies she meets in a light saber battle!
The purpose of our sensory writing tray series has been to make the task of letter, name and sight word learning a whole lot more fun and exciting, and so far, they’ve never had to do any spellings or word lists using paper and pencils at all! Long may the worksheets be banished to the bin.
Make a Stars Wars Sensory Writing Tray:
To make this simple set up, as before, we simply tipped a shallow layer of dyed salt into a serving tray. We’ve been using these gold sandwich trays for lots of our writing trays and other invitation to play ideas, and bought them originally from the party section of a supermarket. Into this we sprinkled a few star sequins for extra sparkle!
To dye salt, you simply add a few drops of food colouring to fine salt, shake it in a zip loc bag and then tip it out and leave it to dry for a few hours on a tray or baking sheet. Once it’s dry it will keep indefinitely. We reuse the same salts over and again, and now have a collection of each colour ready to use in storage containers!
I traced some stars onto black card using a cookie cutter as a template, then wrote on the most recent list of sight words using a fine chalk marker.
We then added some Star Wars toy figurines and some adorable miniature light sabers, ready to use as writing implements! I can’t find the mini light sabers for sale at the moment, though eBay could be a good place to look.
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As usual, they used the tray to copy the words, then they gave it a light shake to resettle the salt and wrote it again without looking at the card.
For younger ones the tray is a great pre-writing tool, using the writing implement or even just their fingers to make marks and learn directionality of text, i.e. writing from left to right. The shape of this tray is particularly good for encouraging this and makes it easy to conceptualise.
From curves, lines and zig-zag shapes we move onto writing names and then forming individual letters. Miss 4 has begun to learn her first letter groups and is practising how to form them as best she can. The tray gives her lots of opportunities to make mistakes, shake and start over again!
So, another themed sensory writing tray with lots of different learning objectives for each user. Simply adapt for each one! In a class setting you could have different sets of cards ready to use, from alphabet and numeral cards to sight words and maths problems. Ask the kids to come up with their own challenge cards for others to complete!
If you enjoyed our Star Wars Sensory Writing Tray you will probably like our entire SENSORY WRITING TRAY series! There are many seasonal, holiday and topic themed trays in the collection to inspire you! Take a look.
And check out our PLAYFUL LITERACY collection for many more fun ways to learn through play about letters, phonics, rhyme, storytelling, writing, reading and more!
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