What you need:

• Card in a variety of colours
• A black pen
• Scissors

Step 1: make the footprints

Cut footprint shapes from brightly coloured card.

Make 26 footprints and on each write a letter of the alphabet.

Make each letter in lower case and make sure the letters are nice and big.

Step 2:

Cut them all out.

When your child is ready to play, place a number of footprints on the floor.

Game 1: Stomp on the letter

Call out a letter sound and ask your child to stomp on the right footprint.

Cheer them on if they stand on the right letter.

If they get stuck give some clues, such as:

“Remember this is a curly letter. It makes the sound ‘cuh-cuh-cuh”

Repeat with a number of different letters. You’re helping them learn their first phonics!

Game 2: Stomp and spell

Once your child is learning how to blend letters together to make simple words, you can adapt the game.

Again, place a number of letters on the floor. It helps to have a few words that you will be asking your child to spell in mind before you start. Choose simple three letter words that rhyme. For example, you might ask your child to spell ‘cat’ and then ask them to make different rhyming words by changing the initial letter to make words such as ‘mat, pat, sat, rat, bat’.

When you place your footprint letters down on the floor, make sure you have the ‘a’ and ‘t’ cut outs, as well as a selection of consonants that they can use to make rhyming words. Say the word (e.g. ‘cat’) and ask your child to find the three letters that make up that word and place them in a row and then stomp on them in order.

Ask them to stomp and spell some more rhyming words.

Extending the activity

If your child is finding the activity easy you can begin to include some blends.

It’s better to wait until they have been introduced to blending letters to make sounds in school before you play this game.

This time you will ask your child to make slightly harder words, which all have blended sounds at the beginning. Blended sounds is simply joining two sounds together to make a new sound. So ‘s’ and ‘h’ blended together makes the sound ‘sh’; ‘t’ and ‘h’ blended together makes the sound ‘th’.

So in this game you will be asking your child to find the right letters and stomp on them to make words such as ‘ship’ and ‘shop’ and ‘this’ and ‘that’.