Elementary Reading Games and Activities

What Are the Reading Standards for Elementary School Students?

Children in lower grades typically understand the connection between spoken and written words, recognize common prefixes and suffixes, learn sight words and know letter sounds. Your child may start to achieve reading fluency and be able to recall details from the text. In upper elementary school, your son or daughter will learn to recognize the main idea, explain plot development, describe characters and recall events in sequential order. You can encourage your child to practice these important reading skills with the games and activities listed below.

What Reading Activities Can We Do at Home?

Unscramble a Paragraph

For this game, your child needs to read and understand individual sentences in order to create a paragraph. Look through books or magazines to find an appropriate paragraph for your daughter to read. Write it out on a sheet of paper, being sure to separate each sentence. Cut out each sentence and arrange them out of order on a table. Ask your daughter to read the sentences and tape or glue them onto a sheet of construction paper in an order that creates a cohesive paragraph.

Go on a Book Scavenger Hunt

Your child must read carefully in order to play this game. Go through a book your son is about to read and make a list of things in the text for him to find. Give him the list once he starts reading and ask him to write down the page number where he found each item.

Guess the Article's Content

This activity teaches your child how images and titles can influence assumptions about what she reads. Show your daughter a compelling photo in your newspaper that is accompanied by an article. Read the headline together and discuss what she thinks the article is about based on the photo and the title. After your discussion, read the article together and compare the article's content to her predictions about it.

Draw a Map of the Book's Setting

A book or story with a fictitious setting works well for this activity, such as a fantasy or science fiction novel, or a fairy tale. Ask your son to take notes as he reads that describe the story's setting, keeping in mind that there may be multiple locations. He can use these notes to illustrate a map of the story's settings. Encourage him to be creative and make his own additions that fit in with the story. Once he completes the map, ask him to point out what details from the text influenced his drawing.