Looking for some fun and easy literacy games?! In this blog post, I am going to share 3 fun ones to play with some dice. These are perfect to add to your weekly rotation to help students practice the literacy skills they are working on. These games are great because there isn’t anything fancy to them which makes them super simple to implement in your classroom. Before I dive in, I wanted to let you know you can watch or listen to all this information in video format below:

If you are ready to read on and learn how to play these fun and easy games then keep scrolling! 

Roll a Word

In this first game, you will need two different dice, and you can use a piece of paper or a whiteboard. At the top of the paper you will have three spots, and I typically only fill in the middle letter and then numbers 1-6 with letters next to each, which looks like this:

This is great for practicing blending and CVC words. Simply roll the dice and place each die on the empty lines (or next to the letters rolled). Students will find the matching letter and read the word, they will then determine if it’s a real or nonsense word. It’s as simple as rolling, blending, and then determining if it’s a real word. This game can be differentiated in many different ways. You can have them say the words aloud or write the words down. You can only have one letter missing, instead of 2. You can use this game for onset and rime as well (like shown below).

My favorite part of this game is the ability to adapt to whatever you are working on!

Roll and Read

This game is great for helping students decode sentences. All you need is one die to play this game. I would typically use this in small groups and it’s another game that is adaptable for your classroom needs. The easiest way to play this one is to number sentences 1 through 6 up on the whiteboard, your students will roll the dice and find the corresponding decodable sentence to read aloud. Here is an example of what this would look like if we were focusing on CVC words:

Students would simply roll and read! This is a great opportunity to incorporate the phonics skills that your students are currently working on. In a small group have your students take turns and it’s totally fine if they roll the same number over and over again because they can practice reading the same sentence numerous times.

Another way to play roll and read would be to have students take a sentence or short passage from a book they are reading, roll the die, and see how they will read it aloud using examples from the sheet below:

Some of my favorites are a robot, excited, and angry!  Again, students simply roll the die and practice reading the sentence or passage over and over in different ways. This is a great way for students to practice fluency!

Roll-a-Sound

The last literacy activity I want to share is called roll a sound and this one focuses on phonemic awareness as they have to isolate beginning, middle, or end phonemes in a fun way. This is another activity where there are a few different ways to differentiate for your classroom needs. To play, you will simply print out six different images and number them 1-6 like shown below:

Before the game begins, you will identify which phoneme students will be isolating (initial, medial, or final). Students will roll the die, find the matching picture, and identify the correct phoneme. Students can continue doing this over and over for practice!

You can change it up by switching which sound they need to identify and you can make this a bit trickier for your students by challenging them to identify the grapheme which makes the phoneme they are isolating, you will just need a recording sheet. They will play the same way by rolling the die and identifying the sound, but they will also go ahead and write it on their recording sheet. It’s another way to take the game to the next level. I actually made a bunch of Roll-A-Sound sheets where students can practice both identifying the phonemes and the graphemes of all different words. You can images of those below and you can grab the sheets here >> roll a sound phonemic awareness games.

So there you have three fun and easy dice games to help you practice literacy skills with your students!  My goal is to always make these games simple and fun so you can implement them in your classroom right away. Games are a great way for students to practice and engagingly learn literacy skills!

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