We are all busy and often part of our day includes shuttling kids around in the car. I use that time to get in some fun, learning activities with the boys which they all love! (I also do this during breakfast or lunch occasionally.)
I let the boys choose which game we play and they take turns. These games help build phonological awareness and vocabulary skills which are the foundations for early literacy. The following games are more for your pre-school guys but can be played by the older kids too. The choices are:
* The rhyming game: I take turns giving the boys rhyming words and have them tell me more. When I first started I’d begin by saying something like, “Cat, hat, rat…..” and see if they could fill in the blank. Once they got the hang of it I’d say something like, “Tell me a word that rhymes with cat?”
* The letter/sound game: I give them a sound like /b/ and ask him what letter it is or I give him a letter and ask him what sound it makes. I started this with consonants only and use letters/sounds that I know he knows from the names of our family members. Once he got good at those, I added more and then finally, I started doing short vowel sounds too. Sometimes I tell them a letter and its sound /F/ and ask them to tell me all the words they can think of that start with that sound.
My boys love these games and beg to play them. This blog is called “Reading Momma” but I must admit that we also do math games. Almost every day on the way to school we count to 100. This is great because my middle guy can count along with us to 20 and my older guy can go all the way to 100. We also count to 100 by tens which both of them can do. And now my littlest guy can count to 10 so he joins in too!