Children Readers From Children’s Games

Children love to play. Why not create games that teach the essential reading skills? Develop children readers from playing children’s games. In essence, this is what I did to teach my daughter to read and by third grade she was reading at twelfth grade level. There are lots of academic reasons to use games like increased time on task. I did it out of respect for my daughter’s heart. In return I got a woman who loves reading to this day.

Our games start with one sound and go to seventh grade stories. The stories themselves are not games, but by the time they get to them they are ready for them. There is one challenge. Rocket Phonics emphasizes the high frequency words, but the students also need medium frequency words. The best source for these words are books the child enjoys that are a couple of grade levels below where he is at.

Children Readers Reading What’s Interesting 

Many students are afraid of thick books. So I start with thin books 1 or 2 years below grade level. Books on subjects they are interested in. If they struggle with more than three unknown words per page the book is too hard and I drop a grade level. (Arbookfinder can tell you the grade level of many books.)

It takes a while to find something they like. The boy below likes politics so I got a newspaper about Biden versus Trump. He was so excited. He never met anyone who read a newspaper before.  I guess he gets all the reasons to hate Trump from the TV.

Now we are reading books on dinosaurs and fossils. Of course, he still has to play Go Fish and as you can see he won. Go fish reinforces his phonics system and beating me his joy!