Fun Reading Activities for Preschool Through Second Grade
From learning their ABCs to mastering advanced sight words, kids build a lot of key reading skills in the pre-K and early elementary years. Parents can help by offering plenty of fun hands-on ways to practice. Here’s how to help your child develop their reading fluency and comprehension to become a lifelong reader.
What are the key reading skills?
Reading encompasses a wide array of skills, and has a vocabulary all its own. Here are some terms you’re likely to hear as your child learns to read:
- Phonics: Making a connection between letters and sounds is one of the first reading skills kids develop. This letter-sound concept is known as phonics, and the sounds themselves are called “phonemes.”
- Decoding: This describes the process of using phonics and other skills to read and understand a new word. Kids use letter sounds, blends, diphthongs, digraphs and other combinations to decode a new word as they’re reading.
- Sight Words: Some words don’t fit the standard rules of spelling and pronunciation, and educators have found it’s easier to simply teach kids to memorize words so they recognize them on sight. Sight words may also include frequently used words like “I”, “and,” and “the.”
- Vocabulary: In addition to being able to pronounce a word, new readers must learn its meaning. This builds their vocabulary: the words they can read and understand.
- Fluency: When a student reads fluently, they’re able to read out loud smoothly, at a good pace, with appropriate expression.
- Reading Comprehension: Being able to read words is good, but kids must also understand the text as a whole. This includes identifying setting, characters, events, plot structure, and more.
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Preschool Reading Activities
At this age, kids learn lots of pre-reading skills. Introduce them to the letters of the alphabet and the sounds those letters make.
Show them how letters make words by helping them learn to spell their name. When you read stories together, ask them to tell you about the story afterward by naming the characters and summarizing the action.
Explore 7 Preschool Reading Activities with Bonus Activities for Each!
- Letter Sand Dig
- Alphabet Hide-and-Seek
- Letter Sensory Bags
- Name Bracelets
- Alphabet Go Fish
- Letter Scavenger Hunt
- Letter Ball Buckets
Kindergarten Reading Activities
In kindergarten, children fully master the alphabet and letter sounds, leading to beginning phonics skills. They begin blending letter sounds into simple words, and discover their first sight words like “be,” “am,” and “are.”
Reading aloud is the perfect time to model good fluency, so give characters their own voices and use plenty of expression. After you read together, ask your child to name the characters and tell you what happened at the beginning, the middle, and the end.
Explore 7 Kindergarten Reading Activities with Bonus Activities for Each!
- DIY Alphabet Books
- Letter Blend Pipe Cleaners
- Walk the Word
- Phonics Flip Books
- Sight Word Swat
- Magic Spoons
- Punctuation Stickers
First Grade Reading Activities
First graders have gotten pretty good at sounding out letters to read basic words. Now they’re ready to tackle longer words by breaking them into segments and syllables. They also learn that vowels can make two sounds, long and short, and master when to use each.
These students understand that sentences have a set structure, and include proper capitalization and punctuation too. When you read together, ask them why they think the characters behave as they do, and stop occasionally throughout a new story to ask them to predict what will happen next.
Check Out Our List of 7 Entertaining 1st Grade Reading Activities
- Vowel Sound Sort
- Magic E Wands
- Roll a Blend
- Syllable Twister
- Sight Words Car Racing
- Sentence Scrambles
- Five-Finger Retelling
Second Grade Reading Activities
Now that they know most of the basics, second graders need to build the skills that help them read and understand more complex words.
They learn about prefixes and suffixes, compound words, advanced phonics concepts like diphthongs, and using context to define unknown words. Take turns when you read together, each taking a page or a paragraph at a time. Model good fluency and expression, and ask them to do the same.
Try This Collection of Interesting Second Grade Reading Activities
- Diphthong Word Ladders
- Go-Fish R-controlled Vowels
- Compound Words with Blocks
- Prefix & Suffix Beach Ball
- Sight Word Tic Tac Toe
- Nonsense Words for Context
- Book Summary Timelines
ABCmouse Reading Games & Activities
Try the ABCmouse early learning educational App for Preschool through 2nd grade reading activity fun!
Whether you want a quick easy activity you can take on the go, or wanting a customized learning path for your developing reader ABCmouse.com has hundreds of reading games and activities designed to help your kindergartener learn and develop their reading muscles.
ABCmouse has activities and games for young children learning to read that cover:
- Letter and Sound Recognition
- Word Blending
- Sight Words
- Reading Comprehension
- Phonics
- Vocabulary Building
- Reading Fluency
- Progress Tracking
- AND MORE!