Educating Risa

Gareth is just starting to read, but knows his numbers, so I thought I’d create a simple matching / concentration game for us to play. I found words and numbers on this blog, and simply cut and pasted them to index cards cut in half:

He began by putting the numbers in order, like on a number line:

And then he added the correct word below each number. As Gareth is at the ‘sounding out’ stage of reading, I helped him with this part, such as putting the three number words that start with ‘T’ together so that he could more easily figure out which went with 2 (or 3, or 10).

Once all the cards were laid out in order, we read the words together. I did this to make the concentration / memory game easier for Gareth, a sort of quick primer. I then shuffled and laid out the cards, face down:

I ended up adapting the conventional rules after a while, and allowing cards turned over to remain turned over. When either a number or word matching one that was already turned over was flipped, I stopped Gareth and asked him to find the match. The point of this game was the literacy skills, after all, not the memory work.

To finish off, I gathered all the word cards and had Gareth read them to me (with help), leaving the number cards on the floor. I then asked him to pass me the number cards so as I could put them away, but did so via riddles, which he loved. “Pass me the number of people in our family” (4), “Pass me how old you are” (5) “Pass me the number of legs a spider has” (8), etc. Felt a bit like Mary Poppins there in the clean up. “For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find that fun and –snap!—the job’s a game!”

I am going to make similar cards to support his early literacy on colours (word, coloured blob) and animals (dog, pic of dog; cat, pic of cat, etc.) but I’d love other suggestions! Or other ideas to incorporate play / games / riddles into his learning to read.