Early Literacy Game: Sparkle

This week’s early literacy game is a fun game that’s super easy to adjust based on whether your kiddo’s at an early or late reader level. The best part is you only need an empty can or container, a marker, and some popsicle sticks.

Sparkle

Ability level: later readers

Directions: Decide on how many words you want to play with. The more words, the more popsicle sticks you’ll need and the longer the game will likely take to finish. For this example, we’ll use ten words.

Grab your ten popsicle sticks. Use the marker to write a different word on each popsicle stick. Seven of the words that you choose should be words that your child can decode (a word that your child understands the letter patterns in and can correctly pronounce). The last three popsicle sticks should feature the word “sparkle.” If that’s too difficult for your child to decode, you can use an easier word like “bam” or “pop” or some other fun choice.

To kick the game off, have your child pick a popsicle stick from the container without looking. If they read the word on the popsicle stick correctly, they keep it in their own pile. If they pull the word “sparkle,” all other players must put their popsicle sticks back in the container. (To make this game shorter, just put the other players’ popsicle sticks in a side pile when “sparkle” is drawn, instead of returning the popsicle sticks to the container.

The game ends when all the popsicle sticks are out of the can.

It’s easy to adjust this game to words that your child can decode. For even more challenge, have all players rhyme the word that they pull from the container!

Be sure to follow along to catch the next game. In the meantime, have fun! If you would like more information about other fun early literacy games, check out sightwords.com.