Educational Cooperative Play with Learning Resources Letter Blocks
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post. All opinions are my own.
Cooperative play and learning is essential in families with children of different ages and academic abilities; when done well, this type of learning creates a sense of familial community, an entertaining learning environment and healthy competition. The Learning Resources Letter Blocks is a great resource to help my three boys to play together as well as learn from one another.
My toddler is a pre-reader currently has some delays in his speech development; as a family we have been working on encouraging him to use his words and express his wants and needs verbally. I have learned that he is a tactile learner and loves learning at his own pace through hands-on exploration. The Learning Resources Letter Blocks are the perfect way to get him excited about practicing skills he needs like, letter recognition, colors and other basic pre-reading skills all while playing with his older brothers.
First we started identifying the letters of their names to start to get him familiar with the idea that letters make up words. Each child used the letters of their names to create a structure using the Letter Blocks. They all really enjoyed trying to vertically balance the blocks in various ways to spell out their own names. This activity promotes name recognition and helps with the development of fine motor skills and eye-hand coordination.
Then, we put together simple words that the toddler suggested using the Letter Cubes. He shouted out a word and the older boys would spell it out with the blocks. We also used some homemade dough and used the Letter Blocks as letter molds to spell out the words. The toddler, loved being in charge of the game and was really able to use more vocabulary words with us as a direct result of this activity.
Finally, the older two boys went head-to-head in a race where they had to think of an answer to my question and quickly spell their answer using the letter blocks. I asked questions like “Name an animal”, “Name a color”, “Name something that you can find in the sky” and similar questions that prompted them to use their memory and language skills. The game got tricky because there are not multiples of each letter, so they had to be able to redirect and possibly change their answer quickly.