Educators know that hands-on learning is far and away the most effective way for kids to master new material, but did you know that hands-on activities can also boost comprehension?  This simple game will help children of all ages to better understand what they read.  It will nurture language and thinking skills,  and best of all, it's FUN!

 You don't need much for this game.  Grab some index cards or other heavy paper.  Cut it to handy card size.  Many people like 2.5 by 3.5 inches, similar to a standard deck of playing cards.  Think up several sentences that are between six and fifteen words long.  Write one word on each card, so that you could lay the cards side by side and recreate the sentence.  Be sure your writing doesn't show through the backs of the cards.

 Once you have your cards, there are several different ways to play with them.  These activities are roughly in the order of difficulty and younger children will be most likely to enjoy the activities that come early in the list while older students may be more challenged by activities later in the list. 

• Give the child words that make up a single sentence, shuffled.  Challenge him or her to recreate the sentence by putting the words into the correct order. 
• Give the child all words from a single sentence, except one from the middle.  Once the sentence has been arranged, see if the student can generate a grammatically correct word (not necessarily identical to the missing word) that could stand in the sentence in that spot.
• Give the child all words from two or more sentences to sort and unscramble.  The more sentences involved, the harder this task will be.
• Put all of the words face down in a group (spread out so no cards are on top of others).  Have players take turns choosing two cards from the group, then discarding one until someone can make a grammatically sound sentence or one of the original sentence.  Be specific about capital usage and ending punctuation rules-decide in advance if each sentence must start with a capital and end with a period, or if you will accept any grammatically sound group of words.
• Shuffle and deal all cards out to all players evenly.  Take turns choosing a card from an opponent, after the fashion of Old Maid, or asking for a specific word, after the fashion of Go Fish.  First player to complete an original sentence wins the round.

 Games such as these help your child  have a positive experience with learning.  The activity portion helps kids stay focused and get the most meaning from the skills.  When you encourage your child to play with words in this manner, several things are happening. 

• Children build facility with word recognition.  The more times that a child is exposed to individual words, the more like it becomes that he or she can read them later in other contexts.
• Children apply important concepts in syntax and word order.  By unscrambling the sentences, they must attend to many rules and truisms that help us to automatically put words together in meaningful ways.  Later, they can use these same cues to help themselves create meaning from text even when some words are unfamiliar.
• Children develop improved reading comprehension.  Instead of simply word-calling, they are attempting to create meaning from the words they read.  This builds an important habit-the expectation that text will make sense and carry meaning.  Without this skill, children can never become proficient readers.