Last Updated on October 13, 2023 by Editorial Team
Who doesn’t want an individualized approach for their Children? Barton Reading is one such program that ensures the same with its Orton-Gillingham-influenced approach. This System is the ideal learning roadmap for children, adolescents, and adults who find difficulty reading, spelling, and writing due to learning disabilities. It can also preach you a step beyond the reading foundation skills like vocabulary, thus enabling the guesswork of reading and spelling.
In this accord, we will ponder our handpicked ten Barton Reading games and activities that would be quite enticing for your toddler.
How does this benefit?
This specially designed initiative for kids is research and evidence-based. It is convenient for all the stakeholders, including tutors, parents, and learners to provide self-study materials with lots of examples. Moreover, it ensures to give them clear access to the curriculum and resources like games, printables, and many more. Apart from these paramount edges, including Barton reading games in their routine can have the following value additions:
- Being multisensory, they can aid all senses, including visual, auditory, and kinesthetically for better performance.
- Since the instructions seldom go beyond basic strategies. For instance, it aims to make guesswork, ensuring they retain and practice rules with real and sensible words. These games enhance this flavor a level further.
- Digital online games are crucial to enhance fluency in computer and simulation.
- Comprehending words and their meaning is obligatory; these games ensure the same by triggering better performance with enhanced memory.
- Games and activities are often a reliable source to develop motor skills; Barton games are no different in this aspect. Moreover, these mostly come in handy and thus can be played anywhere at any time.
List of Barton reading games and activities
1. 4 or More
This sample packet of seven free game boards, instructions, and other games can be your student’s finest buy to learn the Barton-style fundamentals of spelling and reading. Among the seven sets of games, one game from each group is designed for Levels 2-8 of the Barton Reading and Spelling System. It can be downloaded as a zip file, including PDFs for the different games. The seven games included are as follows.
1. CVC words – with short vowels A, E, I, O, and U – This game will make kids start learning short CVC words like cat, pin, and zip by blending individual phonemes sounds together
2. Blends at the Beginning AND at the End – Blending implies joining the end and the beginning of two words to give rise to a whole new word. For instance, Brunch is made from Breakfast and lunch. This game offers learners a set of paired words using which they must form a new one.
3. V-CC-V words; 2 consonants between the vowels – Some words are formed with two syllables with a pattern of vowel-consonant-consonant vowels (VCCV). The same is comprehended through a game with appropriate examples. For instance: Cactus (Cac- tus).
4. Sounds of Suffix –ED – The sound /ED/ is spelled when a word ends with d and t. Students can master the skill with this game.
5. Silent E in multi-syllable words – Understanding the role of silent E in words like Zone, and date.
6. AR & OR in Vowel-R syllables – Interfering syllables that have R controls (er, ir, er, or, or ur). For instance: air, pure
7. OO Vowel Team – Sometimes, words are spelled with the tip of the tongue behind the bottom of the teeth, with lips rounded. These are long vowel words or OO vowel teams. For instance: moon, food. Learners master the same in this game.
2. Make A Match
This is a typical matching game where the player must flip cards and match similar cards by turning them one after the other. The cards contain easy sight words that students come across frequently while reading. Players must find all six pairs of sight words to win the game.
This game can be a valuable resource for educators and tutors to help students with reading difficulties. It makes learning fun and engaging, motivating learners to practice more often. Reading out the words aloud every time they flip a card can help reinforce sight-word knowledge, which supports fluent reading.
3. Reading Words
Decoding words and using correct pronunciation is crucial for gaining reading expertise. This Barton game aims to have players read words starting with ch, sh, th, and wh. Though there are many paid formats to play this game, the free version is quite interesting, too!
Students can choose to play it individually or have a team challenge. Select the team size and grid size to begin the game. Teams can take turns flipping cards and reading words that appear on screen. The game facilitator can listen to players and press the ‘check’ button to see if the team reads the word correctly. The game continues until all cards are flipped open, and the team with a higher score wins the challenge.
4. Rummy Word Matching Game
Isn’t it a breakthrough to use popular deck games like Rummy to learn reading? This can be ensured by asking the students to arrange different cards to form words, and thus gain points accordingly.
To start with, distribute six cards to each player. Everyone must keep their cards hidden from the other players while they come up with words using their cards. The students may keep on exchanging their cards until a player wins the game by completing a word. This activity can prove beneficial in improving vocabulary and reading skills since each player has to brainstorm to make relatable words as soon as possible.
5. Barton 7.4 SW Reading/Spelling
This simple yet interactive game requires you to spin a wheel. The wheel has different words written on it like ‘calf,’ ‘guy,’ ‘5 islands’, ‘5 iron’, ‘cough,’ ‘sew,’ ‘journey’, ‘heart,’ ‘5 courage’, ‘5 among’ and some fun slots like ‘Cough’. A few slots may even lose you points. The player must read the words that are selected to eliminate them. Now they can proceed to spell another one in order to earn double points.
This game helps students reinforce their ideas of Barton Reading and Spelling by aiding them to master their skills and work on challenging terminology to understand the concept. You can also adjust the timer settings and choose whether to count up or count down. Players may also change the spin power to their preference and shuffle the order of the items.
6. Lesson 1 HFW Spelling Word Search
Being a word search game with 13 rows and columns, the player is provided with a set of words that needs to be marked in that population. To ensure efficiency, a time limit is set for all of them. For instance: The first round has a limit of 5 minutes; however, the timer can also be customized.
This game will come in handy as a fun supplement to your Barton Reading and Spelling-based curriculum by helping children navigate easily through hard-to-understand words and concepts and develop their own exciting ways to decode words and thus learn them. Kids in this game need to tap on a hidden word in the grid and match it to the same word written on the other side. They have five chances of revival, which if they exceed, they will lose the game.
7. Level 3 Sight Word Slap It Game
This Sight Word Wrap Game uses all 42 sight words from Level 3 of the Barton Reading & Spelling System and can engage up to four players, with a minimum of two players at least. It has sight words as well as slap-it cards; these two direction cards come neatly arranged in a clear plastic case. All the players are provided with an equal number of cards, from which they must pull out one at a time and read the word written on it aloud.
When they come across a Slap It card on the pile, the first person to lay their hand on the pile of cards gets to take that pile. This game ensures players comprehend the words and improves cognition and spontaneity with the slap-it features. You could also play this game by setting a timer or asking students to remember the words.
8. Hangman
You must fill the blank with the word based on the clue provided. The player needs to figure the answer out before they run out of chances. Every time you make a wrong guess, the robot “hangman” loses its limbs one by one. The clues may be presented as definitions, synonyms, or a blank space that can be filled with the word used in a sentence.
The game contains seven questions in each round and can be played multiple times. If you love guesswork games, Hangman can be a great pick. Students implicitly learn by availing of contextual clues provided to come up with appropriate answers.
9. Jumbled Words
In this game, players use their skills to unscramble the set of words and phrases given to them. These words may be presented to them as part of a sentence which will play the role of a clue. The player must type their answer in the blank space provided below the sentence and check it.
There are a total of ten questions and the score is displayed on the right side of the screen. Jumbled words is an activity that you are sure to enjoy due to its engaging gameplay. Not only this, learners also learn spellings in the expedition of making the letter order right.
10. Matching and Concentration Activity
This activity consists of two games that the player can interact with. The first one is a matching game that requires you to match words that sound similar like ‘sip’ and ‘dip’ or ‘that’ and ‘chat.’ Choosing a correct pair will make them win their game, implicitly also refine their capabilities to recollect rhyming words.
The Concentration game needs the player to flip different cards with rhyming words written on the other side, one at a time. Ultimately, they have to find two matching words from these cards. After flipping one card, they need to remember its spelling and position in the set till a match is found. For instance: you may come across pairs like ‘fish’ and ‘dish’ or ‘mock’ and ‘dock.’ This activity tests your concentration and memory along with improving your reading skills, thus ensuring an all-around learning experience.
Conclusion
Comprehension of notions and academic goals is crucial for students. The above-mentioned light-hearted and engaging Barton games and activities can be potent to ameliorate the student’s capabilities. Because they can form an ideal premise to reinforce words and thus vocabulary. You can also check out Pop-ups, Homonyms, and Homograph games for magnified outcomes. Mull into the above picks to see if any of them can fit your Barton pathway in academics.
An engineer, Maths expert, Online Tutor and animal rights activist. In more than 5+ years of my online teaching experience, I closely worked with many students struggling with dyscalculia and dyslexia. With the years passing, I learned that not much effort being put into the awareness of this learning disorder. Students with dyscalculia often misunderstood for having just a simple math fear. This is still an underresearched and understudied subject. I am also the founder of Smartynote -‘The notepad app for dyslexia’,