This starts a new feature/meme on my blog. I don’t want my blog to become all reviews, so I’ve decided to only post reviews on Saturdays (unless I’m really pressed on a deadline). So, here’s my first Speak Up Saturday.
From The Publisher:
The Reading Game is a fast-action memory card game.
It includes a series of six beautifully illustrated storybooks.
The Cards & Books work together to make learning to read exciting and enjoyable.
Game sessions are fun-filled with a winner every few seconds.
After completing the first memory card game, the student has thirty words “hardwired” into memory.
The Skunk story, Book One in the series, is told using only those thirty words.
On completing the series, the student has a reading vocabulary of 180 words.
Almost half of them are among the one hundred most commonly used words in the English language.
The Reading Game was created by “Wordly Wise” author, Kenneth Hodkinson.
Since Kahlen is just at this stage of learning to read, I thought this game would be a perfect supplement to First Step Reading, which has become our main reading program. Kahlen has enjoyed it, but she does get a little frustrated with it, mostly because she can’t move through the words as fast as she would like.
The basic way you play the “game” is memory with the first set of five sight words, using 10 cards total. Once the student has mastered those five words you move on to the next five and so on until you have all thirty from the first set. After the student has mastered the first set, there’s an actual book that they can then read using just those thirty words.
The parts that I do like:
- working on five words at a time seems very reasonable to me. Kahlen was able to sound them out the first couple times, then she got better the more times we played.
- the repetitive nature of the game made it easy to memorize the words instead of having her sound them out every single time.
- it provides a good break from straight phonics. I have wanted to incorporate sight words, but did not have a good program or plan for what I wanted to do. This has provided excellent structure with a fun model for learning.
The parts that I did not like:
- some of the words seemed contrived to fit into the story, instead of words that made sense to learn first. This was a like and dislike, actually, because I like that she was learning other words so that the story would actually flow, but I don’t know that Skunk would be a word that she really needs to be able to sight read at this point.
- the numbers on the backs of the cards made it more difficult to review the previous set since it was obvious at a glance which ones went together in a set. I would have liked the numbers to be on the word side with the back just all the same color or with the animal picture only or something more along those lines.
Overall, we have enjoyed this game and will continue to use it as a supplement to our phonics. I think that it can last us all year and maybe even longer than that unless she all of a sudden has a huge jump in her reading ability, which might happen :)
You can purchase the game through their website here for only $24.95. They also have free assessment sheets here for each of the sets of thirty words included as well as the transition sentences that you can use between finishing the card games and having the student read the actual book.
See what other crew members are saying here
~S
Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this product free through The Old Schoolhouse Homeschool Crew. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.
No comments:
Post a Comment