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Guess The First Letter: A Reading Challenge
As your first grader learns to read, experts advise that you aim for a balance: give her lots of time to read to you, balanced by lots of time when you read back to her. When she reads to you, she’s practicing her decoding skills and learning to read text smoothly. When you read to her, you can read more challenging language, and help her stretch.
Here’s a tried and true game challenge that you can use with your first grader the next time you read together. Start at the easy levels and work your way up—this is a useful practice technique through every early reading stage, and it’s even fun to play around with later on!
What You Need:
- A picture book with clear,
fairly large print that your child likes and has read with you at least
once before.
- Small post-it flag papers
- A clipboard with a piece of
blank paper for scoring
What You Do:
- Pull out a picture book with
clear, fairly large print. Make sure it’s a book that your child likes and
has read at least once before.
- Now pull out ten little
post-it flags. Use them to cover ten initial letters in key words
throughout the book. In the “Little Red Hen,” for example, you might cover
the “H”, or in “Goldilocks,” you could cover the “G” in the heroine’s name,
and perhaps the “b” in bed.”
- As you read, you’ll open to
the pages where you’ve placed the flags. Although you’ll be doing the main
reading, invite your first grader to tell you: what letter goes at the
beginning of those words? She can then lift the flag and see immediately
if she was right.
- Each round consists of ten
words. Give your child a point for each correct one, and see if she can
keep track of her personal best over several days. If she keeps getting
tens, she’s ready for higher levels: Level One: Words that start with
single consonants, like "cat" or "dog." Level Two:
Words that start with two letters together, such as “chair” (cover the
“ch”), or “start.” Level Three: Words with “two vowels going out
walking”—can your child tell what two vowels belong, for example, in
“chair” or “clear”? Level Four: Entire words—can your child recognize and
read that one?
Note: Be sure to keep an eye on your expectations. If your child gets scores of nine and ten, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your level is too easy; it may be a source of great satisfaction to your child, and constant practice in these early reading skills is always good. If your child routinely scores lower, don’t keep on at that level. Step back, make it simpler, and then you can always stretch later. What’s most important at this point is that your child develops both solid skills and confidence. She can do it: fluent reading just needs to come in its own time.
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Grocery Store Decoding
This quick and easy activity teaches kids how to break words down by introducing them to word families. With little more than a stack of magazines and a spiral notebook, you can help your first grader tackle common word families and start him on the road to reading success.
What's a word family? Word families are groups of words that share a common ending as well as a common sound. All words containing the “ook” ending, for example, are in the same word family: hook, book, took, look, etc.
What You Need:
What's a word family? Word families are groups of words that share a common ending as well as a common sound. All words containing the “ook” ending, for example, are in the same word family: hook, book, took, look, etc.
What You Need:
- Old magazines or grocery store advertisements
- Composition or spiral notebook
- Glue
- Pencil
What You Do:
- Start by looking through the magazines or grocery store advertisements with your child for a picture of a product that contains a word family chunk in its name. For example, if you find a picture of grapes, you can use the “ape” word ending for the activity. You can use any picture that's simple enough to build a word family around.
- After selecting a picture, have him cut it out and glue it at the top of the first page of the notebook.
- Review the word ending with him. How does it sound? Under the picture, have him spell out the word family. Example: for dog food, write the letters "-og" under the picture.
- Now ask him to write all of the words he can think of that end in "og" and are pronounced the same. Give him a few hints to get him started, then let him take the reins. Words he could write could include dog, fog, smog, jog, log, etc. Encourage him to sound out each word as he writes it down.
- Over the course of the school year, continue to add more pictures to the notebook for new word families. As he becomes more familiar with the activity, he can start choosing his own sound chunks to focus on. The more he practices, the better he'll be at recognizing word families!
Be creative! Look for possible product names to use everywhere in your environment. You can choose names of restaurants, stores, toy brand names—anything he may be familiar with. The more creative you can get the more likely he will be to remember that word family.
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