By Sarah Vander Schaaff
Editor’s Note: This was originally written in 2015 and edited by Mindprint staff in 2019. Structured phonics is proven to be the most effective instruction for all students, particularly struggling readers. If your student needs help to learn to read, our learning specialists recommend these reading strategies.
Erika Bird was standing in front of a table ready to demonstrate The Reading Game at the Toy Fair in New York when I first met her. With my five-year-old in mind, I stopped.
Her system was an alternative to BOB, she said, when I told her of my daughter’s devotion to the early reader books created by a teacher named Bobby Lynn Maslen.
The Reading Game was invented by Bird’s father, Kenneth Hodkinson, known for his Wordly Wise vocabulary series. Hodkinson is a household name among those raised on his Wordly Wise series. She explained that The Reading Game is, at its heart, about rote memorization, not decoding.
The game begins as a matching/memory game, where kids try to find pairs of words. A child plays with a “tutor”, a person who is already familiar with words such as me and mouse, and the one for the rather cute quadrupedal marsupial, wombat. After a few rounds, a child gets a flashcard with a photo and sentences using words the child has mastered. Eventually, the player is ready for a book with words that have been re-enforced by the previous parts of the game.
“Frequent exposure through play hardwires these words into long-term memory. Rote learning is transformed into a fast-paced game with a winner every few seconds,” the game’s website says. After several weeks with the game, a child may learn 180 commonly used words. And a majority are Dolch, ones that cannot be easily learned by being sounded out or with a picture.
“My second great idea in forty years,” Hodkinson says on his website, in reference to the game. Considering his first great idea sells more than 700,000 copies a year, it’s not a bad track record.
The impetus to create The Reading Game came after Hodkinson watched his four-year-old granddaughter pretend to read. The game was later field-tested and has recently been updated. It’s now considered a viral hit with homeschoolers. Testimonials on the webpage say it has helped struggling readers as well as those with sensory processing disorders. It’s even been adapted to a Braille version.
“Dad is the super creative thinker,” Bird, who moved home from London a few years ago to help with the game’s launch, told me. “He is always coming up with new ideas and ways to make learning fun. It’s hard to keep up with him.”
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to challenge him. But I know a few five-year-olds who’d love to try to beat him at his own game.
Note: Erika gave me the latest edition of The Reading Game when I met her in NYC.
NancyW