Practising reading with your children can be a tricky one. Some children are naturally quite keen, while others might take a bit more persuading. Regardless of how keen your child is, one thing comes pretty much guaranteed: if it feels like work, they won’t want to do it! So, it’s in everyone’s interests if reading activities can be short, simple and fun!
Here’s a fun reading game which I did with T last year. The resources you need are simple:
- Paper cupcake cases
- A pen
- A cupcake tin (optional)
- A variety of small toys or objects
The toys should all be small enough that they can fit within the cupcake cases.
This is a great activity for getting children reading very simple words, such as cup, pen, or bat. You could also use it with more challenging words for more capable readers.
- Decide on a range of words suitable for your child. The words should all be names of objects, rather than actions or descriptors such as swim or big. The number is up to you – I went with with twelve, simply because that was how many paper cases fit in our tin!
- For each word, find a matching object. It can be quite tricky to find things small enough, but I found that our collections of Duplo, Playmobil and Sylvanian Families yielded quite a few suitable objects!
- Write the name of each object in the bottom of a cupcake case.
- Ask your child to read the words and find the matching object!
If you want, you can also leave a couple of cases blank, and ask your child to write the word themselves once they know which objects are left! We left three blank which I felt was enough for T to manage at that stage.
