Reading Games – What Reading Skills do they Teach?

The internet is full of online reading games for kids. These educational games are very helpful in teaching kids to read. Depending on your child’s age and reading level, you should look for reading games that focus on the skills your child is currently trying to master.

Learning Pre-Reading Skills with Online Reading Games 

Before children are ready to start reading, there are certain pre-reading skills that they must master. Visual discrimination is an important pre-reading skill that helps beginners tell the difference between the different letters of the alphabet. Another important pre-reading skill is the understanding that print has meaning. Preschool reading games teach these important skills through fun and interactive gameplay. Visual discrimination is taught through activities that involve matching similar shapes or letters. Plus, online reading games for kids commonly have stories or text that is read aloud to the player. Usually, each word in the sentence is highlighted as it is being read. This is an effective way of teaching the player that print has meaning. Kids also learn rhyming through nursery rhymes, and letter skills through games that introduce letter sounds.

Phonemic Awareness Taught through Fun Reading Games 

There are many free reading games online that help kids learn to read by teaching them phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify and manipulate the individual sounds that make up a word. This is one of the most important early reading skills, and it helps improve spelling skills as well.Online games that sound out words, highlighting each letter as the sound is pronounced are effective in bringing about phonemic awareness. Also keep a look out for online reading games that ask players to identify words with the same beginning sound, the same vowel sound or the same ending sound – another important skill that comprises phonemic awareness. Free online reading games encourage kids to practice phonemic awareness for extended periods without losing their interest. Once kids master phonemic awareness, learning to read is only a few steps away!

Learning Sight Words while Playing Reading Games Online

Once kids can sound out letters to form words, frequent practice is the most important step in learning to read. Educational reading games are particularly effective at this stage because they are fun and hold the child’s attention for long periods – encouraging them to put in more time practicing to read. It is at this stage that kids are encouraged to learn sight words. These are words that make up a majority of children’s literature, like a, an, the, he, her, was, that, etc. Kids at this stage are expected to read the sight words at sight, without having to stop and sound them out. This can only be achieved by constant practice. Kindergarten reading games commonly have reading material that is full of sight words, making them so familiar to kids that they are soon able to read them without thinking. Once this step is achieved, children are able to focus on the meaning of the text they are reading instead of concentrating on the act of reading itself.

Improve Reading with Reading Games for Kids 

As kids continue to improve their reading skills, the focus shifts from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’. Kids at this stage must get better at understanding text as it is being read. An important step towards this goal is understanding word patterns.Prefixes and suffixes are added to a wide variety of root words to alter their meaning and to make new words. Kids who understand the meaning of common prefixes and suffixes are able to read more quickly and understand the text better. Reading games that ask kids to identify the meaning of various prefixes and suffixes are very helpful in mastering this reading skill.