The Plate-Letter Game

I was too busy to blog last night because it was DATE NIGHT, hello? So you can have a recap of a couple fun activities we did with the kids during an extremely and horrible rainy morning/early afternoon. 

Seriously, is it ever going to stop raining and being cloudy and lame around here? What is this, Seattle?

So for the past week or so we have introduced Hooked on Phonics to Calen (the Pre-K edition). Nothing crazy, we don't expect him to read Little House on the Prairie on his own in two months or anything. We just wanted to give him a head start on the literal phonics of letters. What sound each letter makes, the concept of words starting with those sounds, rhyming etc. It's a pretty fantastic program and especially because it 1) it goes at your own pace, meaning you can blow through the whole Pre-K lesson in a week, or redo each segmented 20 minute chapter lesson every day for 100 days in a row, etc. You can do it every day or once a week or whatever you feel is necessary. 

We've done letters A, B, and C so far. He's recognized the actual letters since 23 months but the phonics have been challenging for him. So yesterday instead of moving on to D I decided to do a little review game to shake things up a bit. This is incredibly simple and versatile game, you can play it MANY ways. 

So what I did was I took 30 paper plates and separated them into three groups of ten. In the first group of ten I wrote on each plate a very basic word that starts with "A", and a (terrible) illustration of the word underneath. Then the second group I did "B" words and the third "C" words. 

 Then, shuffle, and hide throughout the house. I kept it to the ground floor, and hid them in fairly obvious places for my not-so-observant four year old. Then, I laid out three baskets on the floor, each labeled "A", "B", or "C". 

"hidden"

The game is this: Find all the plates, one by one. When they find a plate, they have to "read" what it is (by recognizing the picture). I would always repeat it, accentuating the first-letter sound. Then they have to put it in the correct letter bin (I would always say, "what letter does it start with?", and go off to find another one. This not only helps reading but listening to words as well. 

It sounds really boring but Calen had a blast running around the house trying to find all the plates. I told him if he got all the plates in the correct bins he'd win a "prize" (a lollipop) which made it even more fun. 

I was thinking of ways to alter the rules for future games. For example, putting tape over the pictures so they have to read the words (maybe after he learns all the phonics, maybe). Or, covering up the words so that they have to listen to the word when they say what the picture is outloud, and figure out what it starts with. 

Either way, it's a quick game (maybe ten minutes) but it really seemed to "click" with Calen's brain and by the end he was flying through the plates. 

 

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