Spelling Practice with Alphabet Stamps

If there is anything my son dislikes about school, it is handwriting. Anything that requires handwriting is something he will complain about! To make spelling practice more palatable for him, I sometimes switch things up by doing spelling practice with alphabet stamps.

Since Raisin is in third grade now, I feel that typing practice is becoming more important than handwriting, and spelling is also more important than handwriting practice. Don’t get me wrong: I still make him write some things. But giving him a different hands-on tool, like stamps, helps him reinforce his spelling by using something other than the (apparently) painful handwriting assignment.

We’re working on the phonograms /wor/ and /wr/ this week, so I chose words with those phonograms for him to stamp. When a word has an unfamiliar spelling, it’s important to visualize the correct spelling. The stamps helped him put things in order before he stamped.

In some respects, being able to physically see the word before he stamped it helped him reinforce the spelling even more than trying to physically write a difficult word! If he cannot spell a word right the first time, he gets frustrated that he’ll have to write it yet again. He hates handwriting that much! But Raisin did not mind having to stamp again. In fact, using the stamps, Raisin kept going over his words a few times to make sure it was darker. I don’t mind his practicing his spelling words again and again!

We used some stamps I found on a discount rack. I love he even more solid look of the Melissa & Doug Deluxe Alphabet Stamp Set, which come with both lowercase, uppercase, and a few punctuation marks.