Games are a great way to differentiate your lessons to target specific skills with your students. Every week, we take data to see where our students are growing, where they consistently do well, and where they need extra support. When we find these holes and gaps, we supplement with a review game to target tricky skills.

Today - we wanted to share some of the physical materials we’re finding helpful in keeping our online sessions engaging. Now, most of our students are doing AMAZINGLY well at adapting to the online space.

In online sessions, it is even more essential to review previously learned concepts in case any of the skills weren’t cemented completely. Week to week, we continue to track errors and look for error patterns. If specific skills need to be worked on, we note them and include them in upcoming lessons. One of our favorite ways to do this is playing games. Open to grab one of our free digital games!

We’ve learned that by turning simple reading tasks into games it will provide students with the repetition they need to see success. We try to turn EVERYTHING into games and you’d be surprised because even those of you with older students will see that they enjoy this “gamification” of instruction as well.

Our students often need a lot of practice with welded sounds. So we created this fun game to practice with them. Typically when we play, we set a timer for 3-5 minutes (depending on how much time we have allotted for review).

So here at Ascend, we LOVE all things fall. As you can probably guess we were so excited to be able to throw some Halloween activities into our mix. Most of the students we work with really struggle with phonological awareness and while we have phonological awareness built into our lessons we know that some of our students need extra practice with it. So we have some fun phonological awareness practice activities for you.

The wonderful thing about this very simple game is that you can use it in so many different ways depending on the skill you are trying to target. It's also truly NO PREP. If you don't have this grid it's so easy to just write out the tic-tac-toe lines on a whiteboard or piece of paper and students love this game.

Discover the key to unlocking consistent growth in reading intervention: engagement. Dive into creative strategies to make learning exciting, turning dry material into dynamic games. Move beyond traditional worksheets and explore interactive methods that keep students connected and excited about learning!