Using some ordinary, dry butter beans (sold in the bag at the supermarket), I wrote on the letters of the alphabet using a black Sharpie marker to create a set of alphabet beans for literacy play! We recently used beans to make a colour sorting game and these were left over and ready to use for more fun.
The beans are lovely and tactile, making a kinaesthetic learning resource for other possible literacy games too. By making another few sets of each letter they would be perfect for using to spell out small words, practise name writing or to select initial letter sounds to match objects. Adapt these for any stage of literacy development!
The children are currently 5, 4 and 2.
What they are learning as they play:
literacy: recognising letters by name and sound (grapheme and phoneme), matching letters together by sight and by sound
See our other Alphabet Play Activities here