imgres-2Something about the recent warm, sunny days made this new game by SimplyFun especially inviting as kids chose a water slide game board headed by a pig, dog, bunny or duck in an inner tube! Learning to read is loads of fun as kids fill the “letter lagoon” (pile of letter tiles) in the middle of the play area and draw their first Word Card showing two letters missing at either the beginning or end of a word. Turn over the sand timer and quick minds and fingers get moving. Players race to complete as many words, filling in the two letter spaces until time runs out. TO__ became TOLD, TOOK, TOPS, and TOSS, while __ST became TEST and LIST. For each successful word, a player takes one of the letter tiles and covers a matching letter inner tube on his slide and tosses the other back in the letter lagoon. I was surprised at how well younger kids did with this game as I was a bit more stumped if the blanks came at the end of the word but no problem for them! It was fun to see the variety of words they came up with like PO__ became POKE and POEM. Kids did just what they were supposed to do, in sounding out the letters and trying different endings or beginnings. __ST  brought on a quick response with “test” but then my little friend took the letter tiles for “ETST.” As she sounded them out, she realized her mistake and corrected it. What a fun way to learn spelling, reading, letter-sound association and sound sequencing as kids race to be the first down their water slide!

Available at SimplyFun. Click here