Welcome to the reading section.

Here you will find games and activities that will help your child’s reading skills.

 

The very first step to reading

Believe it or not, the very first step to learning to read is not to learn to read… Am I confusing you?

You see, learning to read starts way earlier than that. It starts even before your child starts to understand what a letter is and how words come together to form a sentence.

It starts with you reading to your child on a regular basis and foster a love of stories and a love of books.

It starts with your child going through the pages of picture books and ‘reading’ through the images.

 

Recognizing sound patterns

Then even before they learn what a letter is, children will play with words and recognize sound patterns. The more they are able to pay attention to what they hear – the differences and the similarities between words – the more armed they will be when the time comes to actually read those.

 

Children’s poems and nursery rhymes can be very useful to help them make distinctions between different sound patterns.

Rhyming games is also very useful in finding and paying attention to similar patterns in words. And this can even be done without any words in sight using images or even objects like here with this rhyming mat game.

 

 

 

 

 

 

One letter equals one sound

The next step will bring us closer to the ‘reading’ we know which is learning that each letter of the alphabet equates to a sound, and sometimes to more than one.

Unlike talking, which is a natural process innate to nearly all children, reading is not. Reading is a learned behavior. It is not ingrained into our system, nor does it come naturally. So be patient as each little reader has his own rhythm when they learn how to read.

 

Putting sounds together to magically come up with words

Once they are at ease with the sound that the letters of the alphabet make. They can start putting these sounds together and forming words.

The easiest words that they will form are called cvc words. It stands for “consonant-vowel-consonant”. These are words like cat, dog or pig.

There are many different games that can be played to help children familiarize with cvc words.

Spelling with nuts and bolts is a fun game for an early reader to tackle their cvc words. In the post, the focus of the game is actually on the fine motor skills as the kid has already mastered the cvc, but I think it will also make a great activity for kids who don’t have any motor skills issues who needs to practice cvc words because it makes it fun and engaging for them. As an alternative, you can also include some blank bolts and let them create their own words. You can turn it into a game where each participants have a bolt, all the nuts are put in a bag and each take turns to grab one out of the bag. The player who can make a word first wins the round.

 

 

Recognizing more and more words

As they are learning to read by “sounding” the letters, forming syllables and coming up with words, children will also start to recognize and remember common words that they see often and repetitively.

Some words do not follow a specific sound pattern or use one that is learned much later (for example: book). Thus, it is important for kids to know how to read some of these words so that their reading experience is fun and interesting.

To help them learn these words, you can use games with flashcards and boards.

crickweb.com offers some fun and simple online games that allows young readers to play with words in order to remember them more easily. (Quick tip: Once you finish playing a game, you might need to refresh the page in order to get back to the games menu.)