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Happy Monday, or, as I like to call it, "Keep Reading Fun Day"! Today I want to talk about the power of reading games.

So often learning to read can feel like very serious business, and this "serious business" can lead to loads of stress for both parent and child. Of course, feeling stressed does not help good learning... or good teaching. In fact, it pretty much makes both impossible. :(

So, how can we get past this sometimes miserable situation?
Take away the stress, of course. Stop making it so serious. :)

But when you are a stressed out parent whose child is not liking reading, this can feel hard to do.

That is where reading games can come in. My son needed to work on recognizing more sight words. He also needed to become more strategic about his decoding by using word chunks instead of going letter by letter.

I could easily see that those were his two weaknesses. But, who wants to focus on their weaknesses?

I wanted to make this fun! For him and for me. So I went looking for some games to address these two needs.

And, yay! I found a great popcorn sight words game (pictured above) and Chunks: The Incredible Word Building Game. (Homemade games are awesome too! I was just too stressed to make some right then. :) )

Hard work didn't feel so hard when it was done in the context of a game. Quickly, he started to get these skills that had felt so frustrating. Soon (very soon), we didn't need the games anymore.

He was just reading. Everything in sight. :)

Could it have happened without the games? Maybe. But the games sure took a lot of stress off of both of us, and made reading a whole lot of fun.

Have you used reading games with your kids? What games did you try? How did they go?

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Kathy Stemke, the Educationtipster on Blogspot, recently called for an interview which you'll find posted on her blog.  I always appreciate any opportunity to reach out and communicate to parents with children of all ages and certainly do this one.

One of the comments on the blog asked questions that would require too long an answer on the comment segment of Kathy's blog so I'm jumping over here to give it a go.  Her questions were:


I certainly won't offer an entirely comprehensive answer here but enough to get you started and heighten understanding.

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TEACHING READING

One of the wisest people in reading research today (Dr. Richard Allington) tells us that "there are many roads to reading".  One size does not fit all.  Different individuals come to reading through different mechanics.  And reading is a multi-level complex set of skills rather than just one so it takes years to reach true competency.  Part of the importance of partnerships between school and home is decyphering those needs and addressing them as needed with each individual youngster. 

Children need to understand the alphabetic principal early on (knowledge of letters and shapes, their understanding that print has unique meaning and that letters represent sounds in our spoken language).  As they gain the connection between letters and sounds, they now have the beginning tool to figure out the squiggles on the page.  There is an excellent explanation of this part of reading on Reading Rockets in their First Year Teacher segment and it's devoid enough of education lingo to be of value to non-educator parents.

It Starts Long Before . . .

The truth is that the strongest readers are created from day one in a cocoon of language and experience with print.  As I've often said, that doesn't mean creating a structured academic hothouse at home.  It doesn't mean buying workbooks and sitting your 4-7 year old down at the table to work.  It means experiencing literacy in all its forms in our world.  If we could just get that right at the beginning, are consistent (just as we are in giving our children good nutrition or adequate exercise), and combine it with strong phonics instruction, we would virtually eliminate reading difficulties by first or second grade. 

So my message to parents is always, "be the commercial for reading".  Show children how interesting, how much fun reading is and, as Bob Keeshan AKA Captain Kangaroo says (I'm showing my age), "They will follow as the night follows the day."  Read in front of them (not just novels, cereal boxes, street signs, bill board

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When I taught remedial reading to second graders in Boonville, Missouri, I loved the week we spent reading this book. Some of the kids had heard it read to them before by kindergarten or first grade teachers or librarians, but many of them were experiencing it for the first time. They LOVED when the monkeys stole the caps from the peddler and how cheap the caps were! After all, this was published in 1938–prices have risen since then.

One of the best things about this book is how easy it is to read once children do a book walk and a read through because the pictures can help with the more difficult words AND there’s plenty of repeatable text. Struggling and beginning readers need fun books like Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina to gain confidence and find enjoyment in reading. After all, reading attitude is at least half the battle.

We used to do a lot of activities in my remedial reading class with Caps for Sale. I would have students sequence the events using pre-made sentence strips that I photocopied and they cut out. Another fun activity was for students to act out the peddler’s and monkeys’ story while one or two other students read the text. Finally, we made advertisements for the peddler’s caps, so he didn’t have to go out, peddle, get so tired, and take a nap. Fun activities that work on writing and reading skills plus a great timeless book equals great reading lessons!

Do you remember reading Caps for Sale as a child? Anyone have an old, old, old copy (as in pre-Reading Rainbow) lying around?

**There’s still time to win one of Clara Gillow Clark’s Hattie books (middle grade historical fiction) by leaving a comment on Tuesday’s post. Contest ends at 8:00 pm CST today!**

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