Animal Sounds Puzzle Pairs - A Pre-Reading Game

Animal Sounds Puzzle Pairs by eeBoo is a pre-reading activity.  "Animal Sounds" is not designed to teach reading, but to give your child familiarity with the concepts that will facilitate learning to read, while enjoying an activity that introduces or reinforces the sounds associated with a variety of familiar animals.

The ability to read is not required to find pairs because the border and background colors indicate which pairs belong together.  A familiarity with the alphabet will be helpful in developing pre-reading skills with the puzzle pairs.

Start with the puzzle pairs linked together.  Your children should be encouraged to make each noise and think about the animal making the noise.  Once your child is familiar with the sounds, you can explain that people make specific sounds as well, and that the alphabet is a list of symbols for these sounds.

Draw attention to how each animal sound begins.  Point out that this sound corresponds to the first letter of the word on the puzzle piece.  Your child needs to understand that the spoken word is composed of sounds, and that the written word represents these sounds with combinations of letters.  When this concept is mastered and practiced, the final sound of each word can then be brought to your child's attention, and those letters learned.  These letters can be used as clues in finding an image's matching puzzle piece.

Simplify things by initially giving your child only the simplest words to begin, adding longer words as familiarity increases.  If no interest is shown in creaking down the words to component sounds, your child should simply be encouraged to learn to visually recognize which word goes with each image.  Simply associating image and the look of the graphic written word in the course of puzzle play will be a useful foundation when your child is ready for that step.

As your child becomes familiar with the word pieces, pairs can be found by looking for words, not just by color.  As pairs are found, your child can make the noise and point to the letters that signify these sounds.

When simple consonants are familiar, and your child is comfortable with the concept of "sounding out" a letter, you can explain that saying the word for the image will help them find what sounds are represented by the vowels and vowel combinations.

"Animal Sounds" should be part of an ongoing investigative environment that encourage pre-readers to think about sounds and letters, rhymes and wordplay.