Grab and Sort: CVC Word Building

Today I want to share a fun early reading game for preschoolers or kindergartners. Learning to read should be fun, and simple learning games can be just the thing to provide some excitement and help keep the attention of young learners.

My youngest daughter, Maggie, is almost 4. She is beginning to want to sound out simple words, but (surprise!) doesn't show much interest in sitting down with a book to actually learn to read. Instead, she gravitates toward letter manipulatives and wants us to put together words for her to read. She loves letter magnets, foam bathtub letters, letter puzzles pieces, and especially letter tiles. I designed this activity with her in mind, but also knew that her big sister, Lena, would enjoy participating too.

This Grab & Sort Word Building game requires almost no prep time and is great for preschoolers, kindergartners, or first graders.

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Gather Your Supplies

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For this activity, all you need are some letter tiles (we used Bananagrams but you could also use Scrabble tiles or large alphabet beads), 3 paper bags, and a sheet of paper. I choose pink paper because I knew it would make the game even more fun for Maggie, lover of all things pink.

Grab and Sort: CVC Word Building. Fun phonics game for preschoolers or kindergartners using letter tiles to build and sort simple C-V-C words. Great for early readers.

Divide the letter tiles into piles- one pile of consonants and one pile of vowels.

Take 3 brown paper bags and label them C-V-C. Fill the bags with the appropriate tiles (divide the consonants into 2 separate bags).

On your sheet of paper, make 2 columns. One will be for real words and one will be for imaginary words. I called our imaginary worlds "Silly Words".

Invite your children to draw letter tiles from the bags, in the the correct order. They should grab one consonant, one vowel, and another consonant.

[Related Read: 6 Games To Get Your Toddler Talking]

Ask them to put the letter tiles in a row and sound out the word.

Then, ask them if the word is a real word or a nonsense word.

Have your child place the word on the paper, in the right category.

Continue letting your children draw letter tiles, make words, and sort them into the correct category.

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My daughters thought that some of the "Silly Words" were absolutely hilarious! They especially liked "VOG".

In addition to providing practice sounding out CVC words, this game provided a good opportunity to discuss vocabulary! My five year old, Lena, insisted that MAC was a word (as in "mac and cheese") and we made a collective decision to include names (HAL and LEN) as real words, too.

The girls also enjoyed keeping a running tally of which column was winning. If "Silly Words" got too far ahead, they would hope for a "Real Word" to come up next to even things up. So in addition to the great phonics and vocabulary lesson, we even squeezed in a bit of math while we were at it!