Discriminate between consonant sounds in the game Racer.

Make a deck of picture cards with items that begin with the sounds you want children to focus on. The players take turns drawing a card and advancing the appropriate letter on its game track. I usually have two children play, and each is in charge of one sound. Both children listen to the word and decide whose letter gets to move ahead. This results in one child being the winner. The game can be played cooperatively instead with the kids working together to see which letter sound wins. But I’ve found that subsequent rounds are more exciting if the kids are trying to even the score or alternately break a tie.

In the old days, I used to cut out pictures from workbooks to make the cards. But it’s much easier now with Clip Art. The pictures you see here are from http://www.mycutegraphics.com. To be sure the pictures stick permanently, you can print them on a 8 x 11 full sheet label (Avery Labels #6470, or something similar.)

BEWARE:

The variations to this game are endless: final consonant sounds, vowel sounds, etc. Just two pieces of advice:

(1) The kids will not necessarily label the picture with the word you were thinking of. They might say goldfish instead of fish, for example. So it’s important to have quite a few more picture cards than you think you need, and you also need to warn children that there may find some Discard cards in the deck.

(2) If kids are going to play multiple times, you need to have new pictures to insert into the deck. Otherwise someone may simply memorize the letter correlated with a picture and bypass the auditory discrimination practice this game is designed to provide.