Teaching Beginning Reading with C-V-C Cups

Teaching beginning reading can be a lot of fun. These C-V-C (consonant-vowel-consonant) cups can add an extra bit of excitement to your child’s learning. Kenzie knows her letters and sounds, so it’s time to begin putting it together. I always test the waters a bit when they are young to see if this would be a fun, challenging and interesting experience for them or if beginning readying will be more of a frustration, indicating they may not be ready to be pushed in this area. She’s still young (just turned 4), so I’m not panicked to get her reading right away. However, if the interest is there I am always willing to accommodate. She has definitely shown the signs of being ready. She has a lot of fun playing school with her sister already, and I’ve done some of my other C-V-C practice with her a little bit already. She seems excited about learning. She may want to keep up with the successes in reading she has seen in her sister. As long as she is having fun with it, we move forward. People have asked me if I’m homeschooling, and I always say, “No.” However, I guess I am fairly casually doing it at the preschool level. After all, I’ve always wanted to be the #1 educator of my child, even if they are going to public or private school. Our current choice is public school once they hit kindergarten. This can always change, but that’s where we are at right now. I wanted to think of a teaching tool where the kids would have something twisting to find letters for the first, middle and end sounds to form a word. The cups were my solution. I wanted to do it on styrofoam cups that had the ridge to write on, but I didn’t have any, couldn’t find any at church (which I thought was a viable solution) and didn’t want to run to the store.

Because I didn’t find the styrofoam cups, I needed something as a spacer between my red plastic cups. I decided that a cut up toilet paper roll would work well.

On one cup I put starting sounds (1 consonant…you can always adapt it to blends after C-V-C is mastered. The second cup had vowels written in silver to distinguish the vowels as set apart. The third cup had mostly single letters, but also could include ck, ll and ss. Abby really wanted to be a part of this picture.

It is as easy as that. It’s time to play. The kids can twist and turn the cups as they try and find words. You could also give them a word, and they need to find the letters that spell it.

Although Abby knows how to read these beginning words, she still had fun twisting and turning to find words. After the initial play, she took it upstairs to join her other teaching tools. She has elected herself as Kenzie’s homeschool teacher. I say that is a fun game, and she assures me often that is is not a game and takes her job very seriously.