Make a magical unicorn sensory writing tray for writing the alphabet, phonics, sight words and numbers in a fun way! Perfect for preschoolers and school aged kids to learn a range of literacy and maths skills and for an alternative way to practise spellings for homework!
Here we are with our latest SENSORY WRITING TRAY in our ever-ongoing series! We have sparked a bit of an internet obsession with these as they’re popping up all over social media and kids’ activities blogs at the moment, so that’s fun to witness too. The kids are loving them and it’s so fun to be able to tackle their homework in a much more fun way than boring old pencil and paper!
You can see our full and extensive range of sensory writing trays here for inspiration to get you going, from rainbows and star dust to Harry Potter, football and Star Wars!
Miss 5 is still completely obsessed by unicorns so it was time to make her a sensory writing tray just for her to enjoy all by herself. This was such a simple one to set up as she had this gorgeous rainbow sparkle unicorn toy for her birthday which set the scene brilliantly.
Into a plain white serving tray I sprinkled a thin layer of bright pink glitter, then added the unicorn, some crystal gems and a magic wand for an extra bit of magic!
Here are some short cuts to help you find everything we used! [Amazon affiliate links.]
I traced some star shapes onto patterned card using a cookie cutter, then cut them out and wrote a sight word onto each one using a Sharpie marker. I also wrote on the back of each one too as there are 100 common frequency words for Reception age (Kindergarten.)
She was delighted by the tray and started to practise her words immediately, using her finger to trace the letters in the glitter. She read or sounded out each word on the card before she began, then wrote it once before giving the tray a shake to re-set the glitter, and then practised writing it again without looking.
This is the classic read, write, cover check technique of learning to spell tricky words by sight and is particularly useful for words which don’t make sense phonetically such as “the” and “was”.
Here’s one way we used it for a simple counting and numeral practise session, using the glass gems to count out a given number, then writing the number in the tray to match the amount. You could extend this to simple addition and subtraction too.
We’ve kept the word cards stored in a zip loc bag for her to pull out and use again anytime with the tray, for mark making, drawing, sight words or maths.
Here are our full SENSORY WRITING TRAY archives to browse and be inspired by! I hope you’ll find a great idea or two for your own little ones or classroom to try today.
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