Any kind of printed text material you don’t intend to keep e.g. newspapers, brochures, magazines, cards from long lost relatives.

This game is easy to adapt to whatever suits you best, but roughly:

1. Call out a letter name (uppercase or lowercase), sound, letter/sound combination such as ‘sh’, or a word.

2. Strike over the found letter.

3. Repeat.

The nice thing about this game is that you can turn it into a competition with a timer, or by playing with three people (one calling out to the other two racing to find the letter). Keep score if you want too, or not if it’s too much for your kiddo.

It can be adapted to have a 5 year old & an 8 year old playing simultaneously (the parent simply calls out different things for each kiddo to find).

You could just as well use a pencil or lipstick to highlight the found letters/sounds.

Below are skills taken straight from the Australian Curriculum so you know playing this game is adding to your child’s at-school learning.

• Recognition of different fonts

• Understanding conventions of print & screen, including how texts are usually organised

• Recognising that sentences are made up of groups of words & that words are made up of groups of letters

• Recognising that capital letters signal the beginning of sentences or names of special things (i.e. proper nouns)

• Reconising & naming all upper- & lower-case letters (graphs) & the most common sound that each letter represents

The list goes on…

Here’s an example list of types of things to find:

• the letter KAY

• a letter that makes the /sss/ sound

• an uppercase T

• a three letter word

• a word with the /ow/ sound

• a word that rhymes with sand

• a word with -ing at the end