SORRY! is a homemade game for practicing letter identification skills.

Players take turns flipping over a card from the deck and saying the letter name. Any card with a letter that is correctly identified is kept by the player. If the letter is not known, the player is reminded of the name, and the card is slipped back into the deck. Play proceeds between the two players in this fashion with the excitement coming from the two SORRY cards tucked into the deck. When a player picks up a SORRY card, s/he returns all of his/her letter cards to the central deck and discards the SORRY card. The game ends when the central deck is depleted. The player who has accumulated the most letter cards is declared the winner.

To build in a high rate of success, 75-80 percent of the letters should be ones the child is already quite familiar with. The remaining 20-25 percent can be new letters or ones the child is shaky on. These new letters should be repeated 3 or 4 times in the deck. It’s a good idea to start with letters that are in the child’s name. If you want the letter sound to be practiced as well as the letter name, I’d suggest following the sequence of letter sounds introduced in the Sounds in Motion program.

b, m, p, w, k, g, f, v, h, t, d, n, a, l, r, i, s, z, e, j, o, q, u, x, y