bossy-r Archives - Pure Joy Teaching

Support Reading Skills with Games

Building Cognitive Flexibility and Supporting Reading Intervention with Uno-Style & Crazy 8 Spelling Games

These colorful, engaging card games are more than just fun—they’re powerful tools for building cognitive flexibility and reinforcing essential spelling and decoding skills. Designed in the style of popular games like Uno and Crazy 8, these four targeted spelling games support reading intervention while keeping learners motivated and engaged.

Uno-style CVCC Game with Spelling Rule Cards

What’s Included:

Each game focuses on a foundational spelling pattern:

CVC – Simple consonant-vowel-consonant words, perfect for early readers. Carefully selected to avoid confusing endings like “r” or “z.”
CVCC – Emphasizes ending blends and introduces nine essential spelling rules (like ck, wa, qu, double consonants, and soft c/g). Blends such as nd, mp, nk, and others are practiced with separate flashcards.
CVCe – Also known as the “Magic e” pattern, this game incorporates six spelling rules, including when o says /ŭ/ and when s sounds like /z/.
R-Controlled – Covers patterns like ar, or, ur, er, and more complex sounds like air and oar, along with homophones and tricky combinations (w+ar, w+or).

How These Games Build Cognitive Flexibility:

Cognitive flexibility involves shifting attention, adapting to new rules, and recognizing patterns—skills that are constantly exercised as players sort, match, and interpret cards based on multiple spelling rules and phonics cues. The color-coded format strengthens visual memory and reinforces sound-symbol correspondence.

Ideal for:

Reading intervention groups
Small group instruction
Independent centers
Home practice with families

Students can use these as traditional flashcards or jump into fast-paced gameplay, practicing decoding, blending, and rule application in a low-stress, highly engaging format. Wild cards representing spelling rules further deepen understanding and allow teachers to differentiate instruction with ease.

In short, these games blend play and pedagogy, making foundational literacy practice fun, effective, and flexible.

Chef vs Magician, Sh Sound Spelling ci, ti, si, Card Games

Phonics Spelling Games Bundle Decodable Digraphs

Leveled educational intervention for the different structured literacy stages.

Lots of great phonics spelling games in one big bundle.

A fun way to learn spelling rules and reading flashcards in a game-style educational setting.

Great for leveled educational intervention for the different structured literacy stages. Easy to fit into your scope and sequence.

CVC, CVCC, Floss, R-controlled, CVCe, Long a, C+le, Many sounds of y, many spellings of sh, Many silent letters, syllables, vowel teams, many spellings of “ew/oo” and sight words.

Based on many familiar kids’ games: Uno, War, Old Man, Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Rummy, and some editable play cards. You must see, there is so much in this bundle.

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You might also like the tricky Schwa sounds

R-Controlled Trigraphs

Teaching the hardest bossy-r lesson just became easier.

R controlled Trigraphs Mnemonic Bossy r Booklet, spelling help for sounds air, ear,

Mnemonic pictures are a great way to help teach sound sorting for the various tricky spellings of the five bossy r trigraphs.

air, ear, oar, er, r . These 5 sounds can be spelled in lots of ways.

This booklet has 35 Mnemonic pictures for the vowels and bossy r – to help create a visual picture that can remind the student how the word is spelled.

Find this item here on Teachers Pay Teachers

Bind these pages together with a binding machine, rings, or slip cards into an old photo brag book for a durable teaching resource.

Print as single pages and slip them into the photo brag book.

Two-hole punch with rings for side-by-side readers.

Word lists on the cards are dual colors with the selected trigraph highlighted in red ink for easy visual reference.

This is a great way to teach homophones, with all the different spellings of the r sounds – stare, stair, fare, fair.

Now includes poster size.

R-Controlled Uno Game

R-controlled UNO-style card is a great way students can learn to read the spelling patterns with confidence and have fun at the same time. Have Pure Joy Teaching.

This is so much fun learning with a bossy R controlled uno game.

Students think it is great! They want to play this game over and over.

Fun Uno-Style Educational Game

It helps students with reading R-controlled words

and they love playing it.

Playing Cards are grouped by colors for similar spellings

ar – or – ur – er – ir – ‘air’- ‘ear’ – ‘oar’

15 different Homophones (including a list with definitions)

158-word cards & 16 action cards (skip, draw 2, draw 4, wild)

The red and black text makes the decodable parts stand out.

Game Play Options

We play with cards face up, and it helps to improve their reading skills. This gives the whole group a chance to help each other when they spot a match, and it keeps everyone’s attention on reading the words.

To see the full description and list of words follow the link.

Teacher tip – The colored groups make it easy sort and to use these as flashcards.

Group By Sounds /er/

Often I will introduce just the /er/ sounds together ( er, ur, ir) and students are surprised at how quickly they can read now that they know how to decode the 3 different spellings that all make the same sound.

This game can be found in a group with other games.

Group By the /ar/ and /or/

The r-controlled /ar/ is one of the few times in English that a consonant letter gets to say it’s name. That makes is special. With the help of the silent vowel /a/ the consonant /r/ can now say it’s name. I like to introduce /ar/ and /or/ together and we play the game with just those two sounds, then combine all the cards to play the complete game.

R-Controlled Trigraphs