What could be better than building words with magnetic letters? Building them with online magnetic letters!

bigbrownbear.co.uk offers free online magnetic letters for you to play with and explore.

You just type or drag the letter(s) you want onto the board. Then drag the letters to the side to remove them. What a cute and easy way to practice spelling! No more hunting for missing magnets either. It’s genius!

It is a great way to practice “Word Families” (words that have the same ending eg. man/ran/tan) or digraphs ( oo i n room/soon/spoon).

Your child should learn to see and hear the commonalities between words. This allows him/her to analogise (make an educated guess) from a known word to a similar word.

The first word I created was “sing”. If I can spell “sing” I should be able to figure out (analogise) how to spell “ring”.

If I can hear that they both have “ing” I am most of the way there. The difference between the two words is just their inital letter sound. By replacing the “s” in sing with “r” I get “ring”.

Try this week’s spelling unit and see what connections your child can find. Can they think of any other words that could grow out of a list word?

Click on this link to play magnetic letters.

Have fun 🙂