We’ve recently been getting a lot of use out of our rainbow salt tray on the light table. In order to keep them engaged and the salt tray interesting I decided to switch it up a bit and turned it into a letter recognition game on the light table.
Salt Tray Letter Hunt Game for Kids
For this activity I combined two different learning activities we’ve done recently that the kids loved: our rainbow salt tray for pre-writing practice and our water bead letter hunt. The DIY light table letters and the letter stencil that we used in this activity are from our water bead letter hunt game, you can find how I easily made these there by following the link.
It’s very simple! I placed the transparent letter stencils on the light table then put our clear tray with epsom salt over it and gave the girls a brush to move the salt around with. My kids are just beginning letter recognition activities so we’re only working on a few letters at a time but you could create whatever letters (numbers or shapes too!) your child is working on.
They used the brush to find and match the letters tiles with the corresponding letter they found. This set we made has two different versions for each letter, one square and one circle letter gem, so the girls also had to find the letter gems and then decided which shaped gem should go on the uncovered letter.
Fun right?!
After the girls found all the letters they’d go though and say each one then pull them out and start over. It takes a bit of concentration for the girls (2.5yrs) to get the salt smoothed out again and all the letters recovered but they did a great job of not sending salt all over. Yay!