Mini-Bingo Strips - Phonics or Speech Game

The reading program we're using (which I will review soon - promise) wants us to practice reading words that begin with the letters d, h, p, b, r, and s followed by i or a and ending with t, p, n, m, g and d. They provided a flip book format for that practice, but I wanted to do something a bit more creative.

First I made the word wheel which is fun, but only gets you so far. I wanted to make a game. I decided to make a kind of mini-bingo game.

I made strips with five of the six beginning letters on them. Then I made several sets of all twelve possible word endings. Finally I took colored dots to match the six colors of the beginning letters and stuck them on a die.

I roll the die and call the color. Anyone who has that color on their strip gets to pull word endings out of the cup (and practice reading the word that is made when the beginning letter is combined with the word ending) until they find one that makes a real word. We repeat the process until someone has made words for all of their letters and calls "Bingo". They win the game and then we get to start over. The game is simple and the strips are colorful. The game goes quickly enough so you can play several times and everyone gets a chance to win.

It seems like you could use this same game for speech practice by putting initial or final consonants you want to target on the strips and making your word endings (or beginnings) simple sounds that the child can produce easily. You'd just need to be working with children who are at least early readers. I'm sure their teachers would love the bonus phonics practice. If I wanted to use this game with Michael for speech, I'd make the beginning sounds /f/ and /s/ on different colored rectangles. I could use the same word endings I've already printed. Even if the words turned out to be mostly nonsense words it would still be great speech (and phonics) practice.