I was glad when my daughter wanted to play a game using her English learning animal cards. This package contains 20 animal cards with images, the word written both in Romanian and English (also with the pronunciation). She knows the letters and with a little effort she can read simple words in our mother tongue. She invented a game. This time I had to guess the animal card that she described. I had only three choices. At the begging she would say the first letter of the word, and then some features. After I gave the right/wrong  answer she tried also to read the word in English. It was fun. Impossible for me right now to explain why can't she read the word in English the way it is written... When I pronunced the word it sounded different from the way she read it. Also she was happy to remember the name of some animals like: spider, mouse, cat, rabbit,  and dog.
 If you don't practice you can also forget what you knew. She did not remember words like pig, bear and cow.
This is a moment of our game: she had the card with an ant. I recognize that I did not have a chance to look at this cards. For me they were new. :-) She told the letter P.  All my answers were wrong :-) But she made a mistake. She did not look at the word, at the first letter, she looked at the image. All the images are drawn and the ant looks like a spider ... The Romanian word for spider is paianjen. So, the first rule of the game was to look first at the word, not the image.
I did not have a purpose, because it was her initiative and I was taken by surprise. But it was a good exercise most of all because she tried to read and pronounce the words.
Now she is playing the game with her dad, too. :-)