Equisonico is our newest invention for pre-readers. Because the world of puzzles for pre-readers is far too barren, and we want to change that!
This puzzle is based on homophones: two different words that sound the same when spoken. It’s quite common to give kids a few lessons on them, providing them with a list of common homophones and some fill-in-the-blank exercises. In our view, however, this is certainly not a very fun and engaging way to teach it. It also requires the kids can already read well.
That’s why we developed this puzzle.
Pre-readers might not know how to spell a word, or what the alphabet even is, but that doesn’t matter here. All the puzzles are image-based. You get 2 images (or more) representing words that sound alike. It’s your job to figure out those words.
There are 3 “rounds” of increasing difficulty. This allows the puzzle to start at its absolute simplest, with “perfect homophones”, so even the youngest kids don’t struggle to understand. But by the end, you’re not just guessing words anymore. You get near homophones (that sound very similar, but not identical), and have to come up with your own third homophone that matches the given images!
Of course, it’s hard to create such puzzles based on images only and using words that young kids might know. It broke our heart that we had to move our best puzzles to the other version of Equisonico (which uses written hints). Fortunately, enough good ones remained for the pre-reader version.
As a nice bonus, we also added a simple interactive story at the end. You can read this story and let kids “fill in the blanks” with homophones. (“Where have you ___?” => Image of BEAN) We felt this was a unique, final test to see if they really understood how phonemes make up words.
We will release a version of Equisonico with much harder homophones (and using text instead of images) in the near future, once we’ve started work on Level 2 resources. If we forget to update this page, let us know!
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Product Contents
Below is a summary of this product's contents. The actual product might have even more inside, but never less.
- 40 Equisonico Puzzles (including solutions)
- Explainers (text + images) for each round
- An interactive single-page story with blanks to fill in