Salt Dough Textured Tracing Letters

Now that Chobie is reading, we’re starting to do more writing activities too.

This week we made a variation on sandpaper letters with salt dough and big glass beads.

First we cut the letters out using cookie cutters

Then before the letters were baked with pressed beads into them to make textured lines.

Tracing the textured lines will help Chobie to learn the motion of the letters and practice them without being frustrated with attempts to write them that don’t turn out perfectly.

Besides, they’re sparkly—always a plus as far as I’m concerned.

Tips

If you do end up making your own, there are a few things you should know.

• Make sure that you roll the clay out as flat as possible, throwing the ball a couple of times to compress the clay and get air bubbles out (like you would when making clay pottery) so that they don’t expand during baking and push the beads out.
• A lot of our beads fell out of the clay anyway, but just hang on to them and glue them back into place in the depressions they created.  You might even want to pull the beads out first then glue them back in so they don’t pop out easily when your kid is tracing them. 

This post partied at the Tell Me about it Tuesday link party.