New board games at the library help make phonics fun

Did you know there is a new reading curriculum in Ontario? Following the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read Inquiry, which found that children with reading disabilities, including dyslexia, were struggling, a new focus on systematic phonics instruction was put in place.

To put it briefly, this new curriculum asks educators to teach not only how letters represent sounds, but why. There is related vocabulary – blends, digraphs and phonemes, that might be new to you but that is used regularly in the classroom.

Thanks to the Stark Family Fund through the Community Foundation of Kingston and Area, the Library has a new collection of board games to help make this phonics instruction fun.

This collection of games will be part of a new “Ready to Read” collection, that will include high interest books and decodable readers – simple texts using controlled vocabulary based on the systematic approach to teaching reading.

The collection starts off at the Bloomfield Branch and will travel through each of the six branches.