Reading Games

We haven't been doing too much this week, 'cause the kids are sick with yet another cold. It's getting ridiculous.. this is August, not February!

One of the new things we have done is a reading game I devised. At the dollar store, they have foam puzzles with lower case letters, so I bought one of those. At home, I took a bunch of index cards and wrote words like cat, hat, sat, dog, fog, log, and so on.. three or four words with each vowel. I tried to get a good mix of consonants in there, too. So, I show Colwyn one of the cards, and he gets to look through all the foam letters (we remove them from the puzzle) and match them up. I try to be careful to only use letter sounds to identify the letters, like "Oh, look, you still need the 'buh' - wonder where it is?" In a little while, we'll try out a program called "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons." For now, Colwyn's enjoying our new game and watching Leapfrog's Letter Factory and Between the Lions on PBS.

Speaking of TV shows, we finally found Zula Patrol on one of our PBS channels. I'd heard it was really great for introducing science concepts to preschoolers, and it's actually a pretty cool show. I set up a series recording, and I may use it to intro some basic experiments. For instance, yesterdays episode discussed the states of matter, what matter is, and even talked about molecular theory. So maybe sometime next week we'll rewatch that episode then fool around with ice, water, and steam.

This afternoon, we're going to the library to pick up Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, I'm Off to the Moon, which we requested on interlibrary loan. We've got a bunch of great books out from the library right now, including If I Built a Car by Chris Van Dusen, Punk Farm, by Jarrett Krosoczka, Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren, and many more that I can't remember while at work.

Whew.