Manipulatives give children the opportunity to interact with the alphabet through hands-on play.

They are able to feel the shape of the objects and arrange multiple letters to form letters and words.

They can see the curves and the lines that come together to form each letter, and some manipulatives even allow children to explore letter formation and tracing.

We used manipulatives as part of our unicorn theme.

To do this, we did a couple of things.

First, we wrote the word U-N-I-C-O-R-N on the sidewalk using chalk.

Then, we placed jewels (the manipulatives) on to the letters.

Lastly, we sounded out each letter until we created the word!