Simple Word Sort Game
For The Beginning Reader
Princess Pea started kindergarten in January, for the first time. Although she's always been a book-lover and grand story-teller, she wasn't actually reading words yet (in fact, she was only just learning lowercase letters), but in the past three weeks she has gone from being a 'picture reader' to reading and decoding words all on her own. To help her along, I made this game from a book we were reading together this weekend. It's the sort of thing we do at school all the time, but this is the first time I did this for my own child - and it was quite exciting!
After reading the book, there were a couple of 'puzzle pages' at the end. I decided to make it into a more hands-on activity instead. I took CVC words (words that follow a simple Consonant-Vowel-Consonant pattern) from the book and wrote them on little strips of paper. I used three cupcake cases and labelled them with the vowels 'o', 'i', and 'u'. Then I let her sort the words into the appropriate cup. Good practice for beginning decoders, and because the words came from the book, they weren't just random out-of-context words. As a follow-up, you could have your child go back and find the words (and/or pictures of the objects) in the book, too, but we got caught up in other things by then. Next time.