I am always surprised at how many people love the small group time, but don’t know what to do with the rest of the students! For some reason this part just came easy to me. I loved to give them time to free write and read. I also had plenty of opportunities to practice sight words and the current and past phonics skills. I made these resources below to help teachers plan centers. Just switch out the phonics skill each week, and your center plans are done! They are easy to prep, can be used year after year, and students LOVE them!

Card games: I started simply adding word cards to board games that I had. The students would read a card and then roll and move their game piece. This worked well and in fact I made phonics board games based on this idea, BUT the winning idea was when I made my own card games. Kids went crazy over these. They just take turns reading a word, but they have the chance of getting a card that says lose a turn or go again. I love to use it with partners they get a TON of word reading in with each game.

Worksheets: I then made these simple no prep worksheets for each phonics skill. Some are multimodal and use watercolors, or crayons, but some are just paper pencil like the word search, or roll and read, there is also a tic tac toe game to play with a partner! Eight worksheets for each phonic skill!

Sentence Games: Finally, my MOST favorite resource I every created is my sentence fluency games. I found my students were making huge gains at the word level, but their words per minute when reading was not increasing like I would have liked. They needed more practice at the sentence level. I found though when I had them reading books that they were often “fake reading”. I need to find a way for them to get more practice at the sentence level but also have some accountability. So, the sentence games were created! They are perfect for those students that seem allergic to books. Since they play with a friend there is built in accountability, and the special cards (go again, lose a turn, and give a card to a friend) make it so much fun! Students read twice as much with these card games as they do with a book!

You can get all four of these bundles for one low price in my Gamify your Science of Reading BUNDLE. I use these games at the end of my Orton-Gillingham lessons for more repeated practice on a skill so they would be great in small groups structured literacy lessons as well! Hope you see something you can incorporate this year into your classroom!

Keep them Reading!

Amy