The Reading Game - A Review

A while back amidst the falling snow and freezing temperatures I told you about my Top Ten booths from the EdExpo. My #8 (no particular order) was for a company called The Reading Game run by Erika Bird and her father. Erika has such a great personality and was so easy to talk to she just drew myself and Felicia into her booth to see what she had in store.

Once she began displaying the game cards and materials and shared a quick version of the procedures my little brain was immediately thinking of those students in my class that would most benefit from this. I was telling Erika about one of my students that is reading on a First Grade level in Fourth Grade and how I thought this program would help solidify her sight word vocabulary. Erika offered to send me the game FOR FREE if I'd blog about it.

FOR REALS!!!

I did a little dance when I opened that package that arrived not too long after the Expo and had to jump right in. I called J (my student) over and started sharing the cards with her from set 1.

There is a set of color coded cards (six sets of cards in all) that introduce 5 new words at a time. Each set gets progressively harder. The cards are laid down in a Memory Game style and students flip cards over trying to make a match. They need to say the word on the card as they flip them over each time to help fast recall. J and I were playing and she was struggling a bit with some of the words from set 1. One of the boys in my class wondered over to see what we were doing. As J struggled he calmly pointed out letters and reminded her of the sounds.

I had such a huge smile on my face.

Once J could recognize the words and read them without trouble (we played several rounds) I pulled out the first book that incorporates the words introduced in set 1. After my initial read through I thought some of the sentences would prove difficult for J - there were complex sentences and such throughout the story. She did very well with it and wanted to move on. I call that a success!

I can't wait to share this with my colleague next door who just received a Non-English speaking student from Honduras. I'm very interested to see how it goes with her.

Thanks again Erika for the generous opportunity to try out this game!