Montessori Inspired Phonics Mystery Bag Game

Vito is 40 months old.

I’m always in search of new learning games and activities to try with Vito.  Vito is quite a challenge.  He’s a little bit picky with activities, he always wants it to be interesting, some sort of a game.  He is currently in a sensitive period with letters, always singing the song, identifying letters in books, pretending to read words, completing his alphabet puzzles and more.  He knows the letter sounds and can identify uppercase and lowercase, so I’m moving forward to phonics and CVC reading practise in our language activities at home.  To start with, we are practising how to identify beginning letter sounds of “objects” in picture format.  I know, I should be doing objects, but Vito is always distracted with objects.  He sees them as toys, not as language learning materials. We don’t get things done whenever I use objects because we end up playing.  So I’m sticking with picture cards for now, it’s working on his part.  Whenever he sees a picture card, he would name it and emphasize the beginning letter sound.  This was our first try, and we’ve been doing this activity occasionally.  Lately, I acquired an extra tiny bag from my Stereognostic material and I made use of it in this game.  We often use moveable alphabet but Vito insisted to use the Hape Uppercase Puzzle (he loves this puzzle!).

So I selected letters CAMR (we do four letters at a time), gathered the picture cards needed and placed them in the bag.  I told Vito that we’re going to play the game of name that sound and we’ll place the pictures in the letter sound that they make.  He became ecstatic when he saw the bag.  I asked him to close his eyes, and pick a card one at a time.

Okay, so here’s the thing.  Your kid/s will look absolutely cute while picking the card.  I highly recommend to prepare your camera and take those precious shots as they shuffle the cards in the bag and pick their choice.  Yeah, I couldn’t resist but giggle as Vito was choosing his card.  He absolutely looked cute in here!

“Tada!” He excitedly said as he took a card from the bag. Now this is where the learning begins, ask your child what’s in the picture.  Vito, identified a cow in his card.  I repeated the word cow but this time, with emphasis on the beginning letter, something like “ca… ca… cow”.  Then I asked him “What sound does the cow start with?” and Vito replied “ca.. ca… c!”

This is how we basically worked on all 16 cards in the bag.  Most of the time, he refer to the letters using their sound, but occasionally, he calls them by their names.  There are still letters that he can’t perfectly pronounce the sound of or confuse the sounds of the x and s sounds, the letter n, and letters g and j.  Thus he often calls them by their names, not the sounds they make.

But, he breezily completed his work, and enjoyed the activity. And he’s not just learning letter sounds, he’s also expanding his vocabulary.  There are certain images that’s new to him and you can see that his face lifts up once he knew what it was.

So if you have a picky student like me, this mystery bag sound game might be perfect for you. Why don’t you try it too!

Picture cards are from the shop

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