Who doesn’t love a good rice bin?

There are times I will breakout a rice bin and my daughter will still spend a few minutes just moving her hands around in the rice. 

Rice is probably one of the easiest sensory bin bases to use. My favorite part is you can set the bin up and reuse it throughout the week! 

Now that my daughter knows her uppercase and lowercase letters, and the sounds they make, we have started trying to teach her to blend sounds. Blending sounds is one of the first steps to teaching your kid to read through phonics. 

Well I guess technically it would be the second, after teaching your kid the alphabet. 

Phonics and phonetic awareness is super important when teaching kids how to read. Many studies have been done to show that strong readers have a good understanding of how letter sounds work together to form different words. 

To help teach my kid how to blend sounds I made some CVC flashcards. You can read more about those here. 

But why teach a 3 year old to read?

My daughter learned the alphabet and their sounds at an early age. She knew all of her uppercase letters and their sounds before she was 2! You can read more about that here. 

Once we also mastered the lowercase letters I was left with the “now what” question. 

There were months where we reviewed and reviewed the alphabet and I felt bad because she wasn’t really learning anything new. She latched onto the alphabet pretty quickly and was excited to learn. When we reviewed the alphabet she was happy that she knew the information, but it wasn’t the same excitement that she got when she was first learning the letters. I wanted to give her more of that same feeling. I wanted to make sure that my daughter kept this love of learning that she had. 

Honestly, I started trying to teach her to read by just memorizing words. We had flashcards and would watch shows on YouTube that showed CVC words repeatedly in hopes that she caught on. What I found was my daughter would look at the first letter of the word, and then stop. It didn’t matter if the card said CAT or CGH, she would yell CAT and be ready to move on. 

Not exactly ideal.

So, I took to the internet. Well, I took to Pinterest, to be more exact. After reading a few different blog posts I found a lot of people were using CVC flashcards to practice blending with their preschoolers.

When I had made my own flashcards, I started trying to find fun ways to use them with my daughter, which led to this rice bin! 

Alright, now that you know the long backstory, let’s talk about setting up the bin! 

Setting up the phonics rice sensory bin

This rice bin features the CVC flashcards we made and alphabet magnets

While most of my sensory bins are designed to encourage independent play, this one is a bit different. Yes, my daughter can play with this sensory bin by herself, but independent play won’t encourage the blending skills I am wanting her to learn. When I break this sensory bin out I let my daughter play by herself for about 5 – 10 minutes to explore the bin and then I’ll sit next to her and try to make a game out of it. 

We’ll pick one of the CVC flashcards with the word face up. From there, we will search in the rice bin for the letters needed to spell the word. When making the bin I made sure to only include letters that were needed and added a few duplicate letters to make the search easier (ie, two Rs, As, and Ts, but no Zs or Xs). Once we found the letters we laid them below the flashcard and worked on sounding out the word. After we sounded out the word we flipped over the CVC card to see the picture. 

My almost 3 year old is still pretty new to blending and hasn’t quite grabbed the concept yet. That’s okay! Reading is hard and it takes time to lay down the foundations for a strong reader. 

What we do to help her is start by sounding out each letter. Once we do that, I group the letters together. R-AT. B-AT. C-AT. This will, hopefully, help my daughter not only start grasping the concept of blending letter sounds, but also get her more familiar with common CVC patterns. 

Supplies

With all of my sensory bins I recommend laying a blanket down. This helps contain the mess a bit and makes clean up A LOT easier! Otherwise you’ll be vacuuming everyday. 

• Small plastic tub 
• Rice 
• Magnetic letters 
• Other magnetic objects, we used washers and metal bingo makers 
• A magnetic wand 
• CVC flashcards
• Small bowl 

I included the other magnetic objects to add an extra bit of fun to the game. When my daughter used the magnetic wand to find the letters we would collect our “treasures” in the little bowl. 

She liked seeing how many she could collect before we found all of the letters for the word. Once your kid gets the rhythm of the game you can start taking a moment to count the treasures you collected in between each word. This would help with one to one cadence in counting!

Don’t loose hope!

Now, I do want to mention, it took a couple times of playing with this busy bin for my daughter to understand the phonics game. Honestly, the first time I set this up she had ZERO interest in sounding out the words with me. 

That’s okay! And honestly to be expected. If you keep at it though and try for 5 minutes everyday (or even a couple times a day) your kid will start to catch on and be more open to the phonics game after they play for a little bit. 

What do you think? Was there something different you did to make this more fun? 

Be sure to share this with your friends!