Spelling felt board

I wanted to create a fun game type of thing for my to son to play over the summer to help him with his spelling and reading. He learned so much over the school year, and I've heard the horror stories of how kids regress over the summer from not using their new knowledge, and then teachers have to spend the first part of the new year playing catch up. One of my goals is to help my son keep what he's learned fresh so that he's ready to hit the ground running come the fall. So we made a spelling game for our felt board.

I didn't make the board today, so I don't have pictures of how I constructed it. But it's pretty simple to make your own. I took a small bulletin board in which the back side popped out like a picture frame does. I hot glued a large piece of felt over the cork, being careful of where I put my glue lines, just in case you could feel them on the other side. Then put the cork board back in place and voila! Felt board!

For today's project I used 4 different colors of felt. I cut out 26 rectangles approximately 1 inch tall of one color and 26 of another color.

With black fabric paint (the kind that comes in a squeezey bottle) I wrote the upper case alphabet and the lower case alphabet.

Then I cut out strips of a third color felt, the same height, and wrote ending letter combinations of common words with the paint. For example 'ike', 'oad', 'ing', & 'at'. With the fourth felt color I again cut out strips the same size and with the paint wrote common complete words such as 'and', 'the', & 'they'. I let them dry and then I cut the fabric strips so that each word was it's own piece of felt.

Now it's time to let the kids play. We took the word endings and found all kinds of words to make with them, both real and made up. (For example we took the ending 'ill' and made the words 'bill' 'will' 'chill' 'fill' & 'rill'.) Then we made whole sentences and had plenty of laughs at some of the things we came up with. My son's favorite was "I am a doapis". "Doapis" is now our new catch all word in the house. I'm not quite sure what it means, but I've used it many times today! :)