I love when I have a learning activity in mind and my kids are so engaged that they take it even further. As a bonus, these literacy activities using craft sticks were SUPER easy and low key to prepare. Isn’t that every parents’ dream??!!!

Here’s what we did:

High Frequency Word Puzzles

I took craft sticks and wrote a letter on each of them. I rearranged the sticks and had my kids use them to spell the words. Then, they would read the words.

Other Spelling Words

My son wanted to dictate to me words he wanted to spell so we tried his word suggestions too!

Word Families

We took the word family of “at” and made different word combinations by stacking new sticks on top of the letter in front of the “at”. Words we made were mat, sat, bat, fat, cat, rat, etc.

We realized if you but two letters in front of the “at” you could make even longer words such as flat, slat, brat, chat, etc.

Word Writing

My son decided he wanted to write some of his own words, so he did!

Sentence Making

We put groups of words together to make sentences. We discussed having a capital letter at the beginning and punctuation in at the end. After that, my kids illustrated pictures to match the sentence.

Skills addressed:

Reading, writing, spelling, word families, ordering of letters, different word lengths, high frequency words, concentration, fine motor skills and a whole lot of fun!!

Materials Needed:

Craft sticks (I suggest having extra so your kids can put their own spin on what they want to work on.)

Marker (I used a dark colored Sharpie.) * I made sure to supervise my son when he was writing on the sticks. I sure didn’t want a permanent marker surprise!

Paper and crayons if they want to draw pictures of their words or sentences.

We sure did squeeze in a lot of learning into a short period of time. Who would have known this idea would have been so wildly popular? It was great to see my kids take an idea and morph it into another direction. I hope these literacy activities with craft sticks are as successful with your kiddos as they were with mine!