Z has been writing uppercase letters for a while now; she seems to have learned most of the letters through writing them, and is learning the sounds the letters make. But she still needs help consistently identifying of letters that are already written, and isn't really at the point where she's sounding out words.

Tactile letters are printed with a textural component that can be traced with the finger. They can help beginning readers bridge the connection between the physical movement of forming letters and the letter shapes themselves.

You can buy tactile letters, but making them yourself is more fun, and it's easy. Just write the letter neatly in glue and then let your child sprinkle sand on to the paper or cardstock, gently tipping the paper to tap off loose sand and leave a textural letter. It's even fine if you do all this yourself - unlike most preschool craft projects, the end result is the goal here, more than the process, but your child is likely to be very interested in helping, and this can help generate additional interest in using the finished letters.

The Write Start has a great suggestion to orient the letter on the side of the card that corresponds with the dominant hand. This encourages the child to hold the card with their non-dominant hand leaving the dominant hand free to trace the letters. Since Z is right-handed, we put the letters on the right side of the card.

This seems like just what Z could use right now as she begins developing reading skills.

It's a very easy project. We used blank 4x6 index cards and Jeremiah and I wrote the letters with glue, one on each card. We passed the cards to Z, who sprinkled either sand or glitter on them. Once we'd run through upper and lowercase letters, we did cards for the numbers 1-20.




Shake off the excess and let them dry.


When we started, our sand was too wet and clumpy, so Jeremiah spread a thin layer of sand on a cookie sheet and stuck in the oven at about 200 degrees. It took longer to dry than we anticipated, but came out powdery and dry. While it was "baking," we grabbed some glitter and powered through our project. When the sand dried, we made some number letters - about halfway through, Z decided she wanted to add glitter to the sand, so we did.

Z really enjoyed this project and Jeremiah and I were both surprised at how many letters she could readily identify. We anticipate using these letters to help her with her writing; sometimes she forgets how to write less commonly-used letters, and these will provide both a visual and tactile cue for her. We may also be able to use them with some simple spelling exercises.


When choosing the size of cards or paper to use, think about how you'd like to store them. Our 4x6 cards fit nicely into one of the taller cigar boxes we are always collecting from our local liquor store (Jeremiah has some fantasies about making cigar box guitars for himself and Z one day) but 3x5 cards would fit in any standard-sized recipe box!

We are slowly working our way through a stash of cigar boxes after wildly stockpiling them over a few trips to our local liquor warehouse, which sells them for a quarter to a dollar-fifty apiece. Some readers will remember our first cigar box display case, which consisted of imagined items from nature that were actually scraps of fabric, vintage buttons, or pieces of craft foam:


If you missed it, you can read about that project and see more photos in the Z Recommends archives.

I try to strike a very balance in these collaborations, guiding Z just enough to help channel her imaginative ideas into results that remain thematic. We frequently develop tangential ideas that I encourage her to think about for the next project. That way we don't end up with a dozen (or more!) boxes of equally jumbled ideas. But the driving force is hers.

A month or so ago we made this one, an elephant watering hole. Her idea.




Looks like a scene of carnage to me, but in fact (she will happily tell you) the elephants are swimming. She enjoys looking at it with her magnifying glass, which I'll blog about when it turns up. We searched a long time for a good one, and it was cheap, too.

Our next box was a while in the making, as we collected real natural objects (mostly) to be included in the box over a couple of months.


I cut down some 6x6" corkboard pieces we had lying around for a padded backing to help with pinning. I thought it would make a nice background, but when Z suggested adding paper I realized that the cork would probably mute the detail of some of the more interesting objects in the box. We used simple straight pins to hold the delicate items in place, and craft glue for the shells, glass bead, and skeleton hand. I had to angle the pins pretty sharply to fit them in the box.

Dried flowers or other plant material would have been a nice addition, but our process was simpler - if she found something, we grabbed it and popped it in the collecting area (another cigar box) until we had enough.


The fake skeleton hand was attached to a fake skeleton arm on a keychain from her grandmother, which I really wanted to include, don't ask me why - I guess I find such blends of real and surreal funny, because it is so descriptive of the way her mind works so well at the age of four. She wasn't interested in the arm but when I suggested we could break the hand free, she suddenly liked the idea very much.


The strange bug-shaped thing is the discarded exoskeleton of a cicada, which I found on a leaf of the wisteria I have been trying to kill intermittently for over a year. Cicadas emerge from them and the shells are fascinatingly contoured to the shape of the body that was inside. Still more amazing is that the cicadas split the back open and emerge without destroying the skeleton. Here, you can see the roughly two-hour process in a thirty-second time-lapse video:



Stunning, isn't it?

The butterfly we found (dead) in the grass. A rare thing. I didn't dare try to extend its wings any more than you see here, for fear of breaking it apart.