A Reading Activity for a Rainy Summer Day

Here is an easy activity to promote phonics, spelling, and word recognition, important ingredients when learning to read! 

You will need old catalogs, magazines, flyers, or greeting cards; plain paper; and glue or tape.

• Help your child write some simple words they know on the front and back of some plain pieces of paper. Put only one word on top of each page (for example, ant, ran, hen, pig, hot, etc.)

• Then have him find pictures for each letter in the word. For the word “ant,” he might find a picture of an (a)pple, a (n)ut and a (t)ree.

• Have him glue the pictures on the paper, in that order, and write each beginning letter underneath, to spell out the word “ant.”

• Staple the pages together to form his own phonics picture book. Add to the book every rainy day, all summer long.

An activity like this helps young children remember what they learn by combining vision, hearing, and touch. This is a fun way to help him increase his “sight” word vocabulary, as well as, reinforce letter/sound connections. Knowing sight words and understanding letter/sound connections are important skills for decoding new words when reading.