Sponge Bowling with Word Families

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This sponge bowling activity is a fun way to practice making and sounding out words along with working on some basic hand-eye coordination. I also love it because it is a great quiet time learning activity!

You can do this simple activity with just a few sponge strips, a Sharpie, a flat surface, and a bowling ball (we used a small marble, though you could use a quieter softer ball).

We made Sponge Towers not long ago and just used some of our old sponge strips from that project for this game.

Directions for Sponge Bowling Activity:

1. Cut sponges into strips or different shapes.
2. Write alphabet letters on them to help make a variety of word family words (with endings like -at, -op, -am, etc.)
3. Build some words with (or for) your child. Stand them up like bowling pins. 
4. Have your child try and sound out the word... once he reads the word, he can knock it down with a bowling ball!

* You may have to cut the sponge bottoms to make them more flat since some bend more than others in the packaging.

Keep building and playing and having fun with words!

Toddler/Younger Preschooler Version:

• Write all of the alphabet letters on the sponge pieces and have your child knock down the different sponge pieces and talk about which letter(s) he knocks down. 
• Talk about the colors of the sponges and encourage toddlers to say the names of the colored pins that they knock down! If they don't know their colors yet, then you can tell them which colors they knocked down! 

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