Product Review - Reading Games by Learning Resources

While we have been playing sight words Bingo for quite some time, we recently decided to try out a few more reading inspired games.  They are perfect for early readers, but with a few adjustments I was able to play them with our younger son too.

For this game, you need one "reader" to call out words, while the other players man little suction cup space ships.  The words are all on circles which have different colors based on reading level.  Rather than have it be a race or a competition, we take turns because both of my kids are at different reading levels.  They like to have words from all the levels out at once.  For my 6 year old, I call out a sight word and have her look for it without too many hints.  We may practice sounding words out to help identify the word.  I usually use the word in a sentence too, although I try to prevent setting out homophones.  For my son, I read the word and then list the color it is on and give hints about the beginning and ending sounds/letters.  Sometimes, they team up to try to have me find a word, using similar hints.  All in all, it's a fun game that let's you mix some movement with your reading skills as you slam your ship on the right word.

This is a game about building words.  There are individual letters on some cards while the other set has ending sounds.  There are different sets of rules for different levels of play.  You can deal each player a hand of individual letters and each player will compete to build words from the draw deck of ending sounds.  Or you can spread the letters out for everyone to see and build words from.  This is the method we started with.  My kids thought it was fun, but then wondered what would happen if all the letters were upside down and we drew them at random.  We then had lots of fun adding the random letter to the ending sound and seeing if we had made a word we recognized.  Sometimes, we realized we were close to a word, like t and -ain, and we talked about what we would need to find to make train.  This game led to some fun discussions and silly sounds.

Much like the space ships game, this game looks fun.  The games come in a popcorn box and my son was a bit disappointed it didn't have real popcorn inside.  Once we got over that disappointment, we tried our the game.  There are several variations of this game and we tried out these two.  Others include various levels of sight words and ABCs.  Players draw a piece of popcorn out of the box.  Depending on which game you have, the popcorn has a beginning blend or an ending word family.  Players spin the spinner to determine the number of words (1-3) they need to come up with that include the popcorn sounds they drew.  My kids also enjoyed mixing these two boxes together, kind of like in the previous game, to see if they could mix any popcorn and create some words.

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