Reading games with Roo

Teaching my kids to read has been one of my favorite things about homeschooling. I LOVE seeing them make the connection between letters and sounds, and sounds and words. I can't believe he's getting so big already-but Roo is learning to read. Now nothing complicated- but he's learning to sound out short 3 letter cvc words. So what do you do to teach a 4 yr old to read? FUN and GAMES. Everything needs to be a game. First off- when Bug was little I bought a used version of Happy Phonics. It's simple, sweet and fun games. There are games for every step of learning to read. But we tend to take a long time on some of the steps, and need a bit more variety in our reading. So here's a few fun games Roo's played lately.

The bear mat is our gameboard. There's a Token (read more about our token system here) at the end that he gets to keep when he wins the game. He moves the red unifix cube along the bears, when he's at the end of the alphabet he wins. Of course there's my favorite fishing for letters. Here I have the letter "a" and he fishes out 2 consonants to see if he can make a word. He enjoys sounding them out, and making silly faces when it's a "silly word" (or when it's not really a word) Sometimes I'll help him arrange them so he makes real words, and sometimes I just let him make them on his own.

Another fun fishing game- fishing for words- same idea, only I have words that he can sound out and read. Later we'll take it one step further, and arrange the words into sentences.