Educational toys for young readers

This week, we’re celebrating Read Across America, by celebrating the joy of reading.

Speech-language pathologist and toy expert, Erika Cardamone, is back to share the best toys to help young readers sound out words and boost their vocabulary.

Teddy Time with Sight Words, 3+, $60

• Sight words are words that children are encouraged to memorize rather than decode phonetically. Knowing these high-frequency words by sight can improve reading fluency, confidence, and reading comprehension.
• Developed by a mom and former kindergarten teacher, this set was designed to teach sight words but also build connection between caregivers and their children

Super Genius by Blue Orange Games, 3+, $13.99

• If you’re familiar with Spot-It, then learning any of the Super Genius games will be a breeze
• Educational matching game that reinforces skills, works on visual perception, and processing speed

My First Bananagrams / Bananagrams, 4+, $15.99

• Play and learning with letters to build words
• The green banana is for the littles (4 and up), because it’s green and not quite ripe yet
• Uses lowercase letters, build words with letters, but simplified. We’ve got digraphs, vowel teams and common word endings.

Sight Word Bean Bags / Sight Word Slam by Educational Resources, 4+, $34.99

• 25 double sided bean bags that makes sight word practice engaging, interactive, and fun
• toss, sort, stack, hide, and create short sentences with these bean bags

Is or Isn’t by SimplyFun, 6+, $34

• Players take turns rolling the die and moving their pawns around the gameboard. When they land on a word card space, all players look to identify the matching synonym or antonym on their bingo boards
• Vocabulary building and building reading confidence as kids are reading single words with pictured cues.