Motivating Little Boys to Read

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Sometimes, it can be a little hard to get our little boys motivated to read. Boys are boys and they just want to do what they do best…play, play, play.

So, I was thinking of how to make reading engaging enough to hold their attention. My son thinks that the ABC chart is just plain BLAH, BLAH, BLAH…..boring.

Personalized Alphabet
I came up with a personalized Alphabet Chart designed especially for BOYS. First, I chose a theme that he loves. He has been obsessed with Super Heroes since forever so this seems like the best choice. Then, I made a list of the things that he and most little boys are interested in and came up with this alphabet chart. It includes words such as airplane, frog, kite, magnet, lion, pirate and robot.

Do you think that he is interested now?

 Oh, yes, yes, yes 🙂

Super Alphabet cards
I used the pictures from the alphabet chart to make individual alphabet cards for our pocket chart. 

Super Hero cape
I found this old t-shirt. I have no idea who it belongs to. Someone must have left it behind and never claimed it:) So, I cut the front part out and made it into a Super Hero learning cape to match the theme. The length is perfect. He runs around the house pretending to fly and uses his Super Powers to learn:)
Now, he is ready to learn!
Writing Skills
He started out by practicing his writing skills. He was so eager that he did not give me time to laminate and cut the cards out. Laminated cards are better so that  you can use them over and over again with a vis-a-vis marker. By the way, he is wearing his Super Hero cape while he “writes like a hero”
Dice Game
I made alphabet cards to fit in these dice with clear pockets. Angel had fun rolling the dice.  Not only is it fun, but it still keeps with the super hero theme.

Splat game
We used the dice game from above to play a roll the letter, splat the letter game. This is good to review letter names and letter sounds.  So, when he rolled out the letter “c”, he used a fly swatter that we found at Wal-Mart to “SPLAT” the letter. Wow, this fly swatter is perfect for this game. He loves anything with ACTION.

I also made word family cards for the dice. Angel played the “roll a word game.” We worked on making words with -at. 

Roll-a-Word, Color-the-Word
Every time that he rolled a word, he had to identify it on the -at word list and color the box with the word. Like this:

Roll-a-Word, Trace-a-Word
Angel had fun identifying the words. Now, he was ready to work with words. I made him a Read it, Trace it, Build it printable. He rolled the dice to make a word with -at. Then, he worked on that word.  Here, he is tracing the word bat.

Build-a-Word
Finally, he cut the letters out to build the word.

It was a very busy week, but a lot of fun 🙂 This personalized theme for little boys sure got him motivated. ( I am working on a personalized theme for little girls too.)

If you are interested in these activities, you can find them here:

Super Hero Alphabet

Super Hero Word Families: The cards can be used in the pocket chart. We just thought it was much more fun to use them in the Carson Dellosa cubes:)

These are the cubes that we used.

Make sure to download this 10 page freebie. 
These are the Word Family lists.
Enjoy!
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