For beginner readers

First School Year Kit

We have created this evidence-based learning tool to help beginner readers develop their word fluency and orthographic mapping skills, by applying their knowledge of phonemes and graphemes to decode words.

The First School Year Kit contains 4 Reading Towers and more than 300 decodable words!  Instructions to four engaging games is included with the potential to create many more literacy activities using the same word blocks. 

Games include:

1. What's in the Bag? This activity develops students phonemic awareness skills. One player picks out a word block without revealing to the others what is written on the block. The player then sounds out the word, while the other players blend the sounds to correctly guess the word.

2. Four in a row develops students decoding skills and orthographic mapping. This game is great for literacy centres, with two players required per tower.  This game of chance and strategy includes a six sided die. Students can only read a word from the column that matches the number on the die. The first student who reads four words in a row, wins the game. 

3. Thirty seconds: This game was created to develop students recognition of graphemes. All the word blocks are laid out on a surface and students have 30 seconds to find as many blocks with the focus grapheme / phoneme that the teacher calls out.

4. Word Tower:  This game  is just like Jenga with words! Simply pull out a word, read it and place it on top of the tower without making the tower tumble.

5. Create your own activities! Please share with us any other activities you create with our word blocks. Here are some others we've used in our tutor sessions: group words that rhyme and record them in a table; pull a random word block from the bag and create an oral or written sentence; find all of the verbs in the word tower; read a word block and line the blocks upright like dominoes.

$129.95

Price includes postage to all locations in Australia