Great Games for Reading and Spelling

Michael Audas – Speech Pathologist.

Reading and spelling are not ’natural’ skills for any child to acquire. Unlike learning to walk, learning to speak, and so on, the decoding of words and their constituent alphabetic characters into sounds requires more than just the right kind of environmental stimuli to be present. That being said, a lot of kids do acquire the necessary knowledge and skills for reading and spelling with very little in the way of explicit instruction concerning spelling rules or letter-to-sound correspondences.

Struggling readers and spellers, however, do require explicit instruction, and drills, and quite a lot of both. An amount which quickly becomes tedious for them, in fact. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t fun ways for these same children to improve their reading and spelling—ways that can help break up otherwise- monotonous phonics drills and the like. In fact, when you play these games with your children, they’ll be having so much fun they won’t even realise they’re working on academic skills!