Making Early Literacy Fun

Goblin is 5 years old

Before Goblin started school in September he couldn't read. In fact he didn't know that many letters either. I try to follow his lead, and as he never showed much interest in letters and reading so I didn't push it. Occasionally I had a little wobble and worried that I was disadvantaging him by not getting him started early. But Hublet came to the rescue pointing out various pieces of research that show that early reading doesn't reflect on later attainment. What is important is a love of reading - and that only comes when a child doesn't lose interest. So now that he is being introduced to reading through school I am balancing a tightrope, trying to support his school based learning, but not wanting to force things or make it boring. So we've been playing games. Goblin really enjoyed sight word hide and seek.

I wrote a little bingo grid of simple sight words that have been showing up in his reading books frequently. Then I made another set which I chopped up and stuck (with blue tac) around the house - mostly at his eye level.

I sent Goblin off to find them, bring them back, attempt to read them, and match them to the bingo card. Even when he wasn't able to read the word, the letter recognition and matching are still important steps to literacy. Matching them to the bingo card is also self correcting as he can see if he's got all the words I hid.

Some other games we've been playing include sliding words, haunted house word matching, fishing for letters and making our own simple reading books.