Schoolfamily.com - Helping parents help their kids succeed at school

Here’s an activity that combines visual, auditory, and tactile skills in a game that can help improve national reading standards.

I used this game with my own children to increase their interest in reading at an early age.

Here's how you play:

• Take some 3"x 5" index cards and label objects in their room. Do this by writing the object's name on the card with a black marker. Be sure to use lower case letters when printing.
  
  Once your child can easily point to the card and say the single word, take it to the next level.
  
  
• Using one index card for each word, label the objects in sentence form. For example, "This is a window. This is a door. This is a bed. etc." Use one capital letter and the rest lowercase for the sentence.
  
  Repeating the first three words, "This is a..." to begin each sentence, allows children to discover a word pattern. By adding the item name to the end of the word pattern a child can complete the sentence. At night children enjoy lying in bed and "reading around" their room.
  
  
• Once your child is comfortable saying the whole sentence, make a second set of cards. (One set of "This is a..." then one card for each different item that was labeled.) Children then visually match the word cards in their hands, to the sentences in their room.
  
  Children love doing this activity. It reinforces word patterns, visual matching, and reading comprehension in a personal way. This technique works well for visual, auditory, and hands-on learners. It works because saying, matching and handling the cards gives each type of "learner" a chance to make a literacy connection.