Today I had a brainwave and created a new word-game for the boys that's based on their favourite Thomas the Tank Engine characters.
It's called the Thomas Letter Game (until I think of a better name).
I found some images of the Thomas characters, and put them into a Word doc. I typed the name of each one above the image, excluding the very first letter - so Thomas looks like "HOMAS", and Percy looks like "ERCY" etc. I printed them out in colour on our printer.
I stuck the printouts on a wall with blue tack, just at the right height for the boys to look at. I also printed out the missing letters, cut them out, and put them in a little pile.
The kids took turns to take a letter from a pile, and match it to the correct character, sticking it with bluetack onto the printout.
My boys LOVED playing it.
Most of the time they walked around a bit, tested how each letter looked with the name to see if it looked and read right. On the odd occasion they knew immediately where a letter belonged - like the sounds for B, P and H were matched immediately to Bertie, Percy and Hiro.
This game is the right reading level for JJ (an advanced 3 1/2 year old reader), and harder for SamSam (2 1/2), but SamSam still managed to get some right on his own. What he really likes is looking at his favourite trains up on the wall!
It was surprising that the most obvious letter 'T' for Thomas was the hardest for them! I think maybe because they can't pronounce the letter T properly yet (they say something like Nomas!).
I was hoping to put the file here for downloading, but there's no function on blogger to do it!
However, this concept could easily be changed to a different category, eg. fruit, animals, nature, objects, food etc. It's pretty easy to make if you know how to use Word.
What you need:
Instructions:
It's called the Thomas Letter Game (until I think of a better name).
I found some images of the Thomas characters, and put them into a Word doc. I typed the name of each one above the image, excluding the very first letter - so Thomas looks like "HOMAS", and Percy looks like "ERCY" etc. I printed them out in colour on our printer.
The kids took turns to take a letter from a pile, and match it to the correct character, sticking it with bluetack onto the printout.
My boys LOVED playing it.
Most of the time they walked around a bit, tested how each letter looked with the name to see if it looked and read right. On the odd occasion they knew immediately where a letter belonged - like the sounds for B, P and H were matched immediately to Bertie, Percy and Hiro.
This game is the right reading level for JJ (an advanced 3 1/2 year old reader), and harder for SamSam (2 1/2), but SamSam still managed to get some right on his own. What he really likes is looking at his favourite trains up on the wall!
It was surprising that the most obvious letter 'T' for Thomas was the hardest for them! I think maybe because they can't pronounce the letter T properly yet (they say something like Nomas!).
I was hoping to put the file here for downloading, but there's no function on blogger to do it!
However, this concept could easily be changed to a different category, eg. fruit, animals, nature, objects, food etc. It's pretty easy to make if you know how to use Word.
What you need:
- A printer, preferably colour
- Paper to print on
- Blue tack
- Scissors
Instructions:
- Create document with images and typed words with missing initial letter
- Print out the pages. It looks best in colour.
- Use bluetack to stick onto the wall at the eye-height of your children
- Cut out the letters and put them in a little pile
- Each child takes a turn to pick a letter from the pile
- Stick some bluetack on the back for them
- Let them figure out which letter goes where
- Give helpful hints where necessary!
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