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January 23, 2015 | 4 Comments

Quick and Easy Reading Puzzles

Creating activities for your child at home or students at school shouldn’t take you all night. Whether you are a teacher or a parent (or both) you are busy. Creating fun holiday themed activities can wipe you out. These simple 5-minute reading puzzles can be done with ANY theme. You can find foam cut outs in pretty much any shape (right now there are three different holiday ones available at the dollar store) and together with stickers you can make a fun activity for free choice, literacy centers, or as a before lunch activity for a day when we didn’t have school.  I like using stickers because drawing is not a talent I possess and I want my daughter to focus on the word not sit there trying to decide if Mommy drew a cat or a pig. If you can draw grab a sharpie and go for it!

reading puzzles

Gather your materials. You will need some foam shapes; we are using hearts because someone is getting very excited about Valentine’s Day, some stickers of things like animals, household items, etc… and more stickers with lowercase letters. If you are going to focus only on the beginning sound  (matching bear to B), you could use uppercase, but now that my daughter has been asking about spelling and sounding words out I have shifted to all lowercase as much as possible. Different teachers (and districts) will teach letters in different sequences, but I have never had a hard time teaching letters in tandem.

In my 2 & 3-year-old classroom I point out both naturally like when they see their name we take the time to mention that their name has one uppercase letter and the rest are lowercase. I use both when playing games and already I have students who easily recognize both as different forms of the same letter. reading puzzles

Stick the object sticker on one sidequick & easy reading puzzles

The word on the other. easy reading puzzles

Cut. I cut each heart differently so that these simple puzzles are self-correcting. If the heart doesn’t come together the child knows to keep trying.

easy reading puzzles for kidsI set them up so that the items were out and she had a pile of the words. I did this on purpose. The idea was to have her read the word, then find the item. I didn’t want her to see the bear and then scan for a word that started with b. Can you see the difference? How you set it up will depend on what your goals are. My daughter has made the big leap from sounding out CVC words like cat, mop, and fan, to much longer words with more syllables and complicated phonetic rules like R-controlled vowels. This reading puzzles game lets her do that without the pressure of an adult over her shoulder. But it has a self-correcting feature built in she can get back on track herself if she makes a mistake. reading puz

Put the puzzles together! easy reading puzzles for children

She had no trouble starting with sounding the words out then finding the match. Some of the words were challenging. But she’d sound it out initially then look at what other half might make sense. This is NOT cheating. It’s a perfect example of how children can and should use illustrations in the text as a scaffold.

easy reading puzzles for literacy centers

All these strategies in a quick and easy to put together activity.

For other activities like this reading puzzles activity, make sure to follow me on Facebook!

Filed Under: Age Preschool, Age: Kindergarten, Letters & Numbers, Phonics, Puzzles, Reading, Valentine's Day | 4 Comments

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4 Comments

  1. Kristina says

    January 23, 2015 at 3:16 pm

    Thank you for sharing. Easy is always best as I seem to always spend way to much time on a learning activity. Nice and simple. Thank you!

    to Kristina" aria-label='reply to this comment to Kristina'>reply to this comment
  2. Kristina says

    February 15, 2015 at 8:26 am

    I linked over blog posts on my blog posts.

    The kids loved the activity.

    http://carterclan2006.blogspot.com/2015/02/valentine-puzzle.html

    to Kristina" aria-label='reply to this comment to Kristina'>reply to this comment

Trackbacks

  1. Valentine's Day Learning Resources: Unit Studies, Coloring Pages, Science, Art, + More! | Free Homeschool Deals © says:
    February 7, 2016 at 3:17 pm

    […] DIY Broken Heart Reading Puzzles – You just need foam hearts and stickers! […]

    to Valentine's Day Learning Resources: Unit Studies, Coloring Pages, Science, Art, + More! | Free Homeschool Deals ©" aria-label='reply to this comment to Valentine's Day Learning Resources: Unit Studies, Coloring Pages, Science, Art, + More! | Free Homeschool Deals ©'>reply to this comment
  2. Valentine's Day Writing Prompts for Kindergarteners Printable - Simple Fun for Kids says:
    February 14, 2017 at 1:37 pm

    […] Broken Heart Reading Puzzles by No Time for Flash Cards […]

    to Valentine's Day Writing Prompts for Kindergarteners Printable - Simple Fun for Kids" aria-label='reply to this comment to Valentine's Day Writing Prompts for Kindergarteners Printable - Simple Fun for Kids'>reply to this comment

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