Ages 6–7: Growing Reader Games

Games in this collection:

Spelligator by Junior Learning (Teacher’s Choice Award, 2014; Informal Education Award of Excellence, 2012)
Players: 2–4 • Play time: ~15–20 minutes

Decoding Dominoes by Junior Learning
Players: 1–4 • Play time: ~10–15 minutes

This collection helps growing readers move beyond recognizing familiar words into actively decoding, building, and spelling them—strengthening the phonics patterns that make increasingly independent reading possible.

Who this collection is for:
This collection is designed for boys and girls ages 6–7 who know their basic letter sounds and are beginning to read words more independently. It’s especially well suited to children who are working on sounding out unfamiliar words, noticing spelling patterns, and connecting the words they hear with the letters they see.

If your child enjoys building early words with My First Bananagrams, this collection offers a natural next step—moving from familiar letter combinations into more deliberate decoding, phonemic awareness, and spelling patterns.

The two games approach the reading process from opposite directions. Decoding Dominoes asks children to look at a written word, decode it, and connect it with meaning. Spelligator asks them to start with sounds and letter patterns and construct words themselves. Together, they reinforce the important connection between reading a word and being able to build it.

What’s inside:
Spelligator turns phonics and spelling practice into a hands-on word-building game. Players flip letter tiles and use them to construct words on their colorful Spelligators, working with beginning, middle, and ending sounds as well as common letter combinations.

The specially shaped and color-coded tiles provide useful visual and tactile support. Their shapes help children recognize where different letter patterns belong, giving growing readers a way to notice and correct mistakes more independently rather than simply being told that a word is wrong.

Two levels of play—Rookie and Expert—allow the challenge to increase as children become more confident. With 75 letter tiles and a supporting word list, children can progress from more familiar spelling patterns toward increasingly complex word building.

Decoding Dominoes approaches reading from the other direction. The 28 durable dominoes pair written words with photographic images, and children build a domino chain by decoding a word and finding the picture that matches its meaning.

That simple matching mechanic gives children a reason to actually read each word rather than rely on memorization alone. They practice looking across the whole word, blending sounds together, recognizing familiar spelling patterns, and checking whether what they have read makes sense.

The picture support is especially useful for growing readers because it provides immediate meaning without supplying the answer before the child has attempted the word. The domino format also makes repeated decoding practice feel much more like play than a worksheet or stack of flash cards.

Together, these games strengthen two complementary literacy processes: Decoding Dominoes helps children turn print into a meaningful spoken word, while Spelligator helps them turn sounds and ideas back into correctly structured written words.

Why this collection works:

• Strengthens phonics and decoding skills
• Builds phonemic awareness
• Develops spelling and word-building confidence
• Reinforces common letter and sound patterns
• Connects written words with meaning
• Encourages children to notice and self-correct errors
• Provides hands-on practice instead of repetitive worksheets
• Supports the transition toward more independent reading

This is an important stage in learning to read: children are moving from recognizing words they already know toward having the tools to figure out new words for themselves.

Why A Thoughtful Choice picked these:
We chose these games because growing readers need practice in both directions.

Being able to sound out a written word is important, but so is understanding how the sounds inside a word fit together when spelling it. Decoding Dominoes gives children repeated practice turning print into meaning, while Spelligator asks them to manipulate sounds and letter patterns to create words themselves.

Both games provide enough structure to support a developing reader without doing all of the thinking for them. That makes the collection particularly useful for children who have mastered the very earliest reading skills but still need playful, repeated practice before decoding and spelling begin to feel automatic.

For homeschool families, these games can also work beautifully as a short phonics warm-up, literacy-center activity, or change of pace when a child needs reading practice without another page of written work.