Age 5 and older
Reading isn’t the only way you can work on reading skills ( although please do read as much and as often as you can ! ) you can also play games to build skills and confidence. This game is designed to work on word family knowledge. Word families are groups of words that share common combination of letters and similar sound. When new readers play with word families they become more confident as they see the common ending and can quickly read the new word. This game was great as my son read words without surrounding context successfully because of the other words in the family acting as a scaffold.
- Gather your materials. You will need some magazines or family photos you can cut up, construction paper, double stick tape , painter’s tape, scissors and a marker.
- Start by making your frames. Simply fold the construction paper in half and cut the middle out.
- Next cut moms, dads, babies and kids out. Tape them to construction paper making sure you leave room on the bottom to write the words under the people.
- Cut out and write the words. The best list of word families I have ever found was here . I tried to do some words I knew he’d find “easy” and others that would be more of a challenge, his reading ability is changing so quickly I was honestly unsure of exactly what would be sweet spot for his learning. Do not be afraid to try something , you can change it as you go if need be.
- I taped the frames to the table using painter’s tape. Then I wrote out the family name but when we do this again I will be leaving these off and instead placing one word /family member in the frame to start. These titles really confused my son . After he matched up a person into the family he was golden. I’d suggest skipping the names and just taping the frames.
- Play.
- He was unsure at first .
- But he did it !
The confidence grew quickly. - Soon he was being his old goofy self saying ” Here is your Mama baby !”
- The ail family was the tricky one for him and when he completed the family he exclaimed ” I did it!” which is music to any parent or teacher’s ears.
To make this simpler try having 2-3 family members already in the frames and only fill in the blank with a missing family member instead of having to create the whole family.
To make it more challenging provide the frames and family members with no family names ( an, ack, ail…) at the start. Let your child sort and group with no starting point.
Books About Families
Sometimes It’s Grandmas and Grandpas: Not Mommies and Daddies
Daddy and I… by Eloise Greenfield is a great little board book about the every day things that a toddler son may help his dad with. From painting, to shopping to stopping for some hugs this book is great for toddlers to see all the things that make up being a dad and caring for your family. It also has a great lesson about children pitching in to help keep a family going too.
Everywhere Babies by Susan Meyers and Marla Frazee . The concept is simple but the results are wonderful. The book celebrates all sorts of babies and all the every day things babies do. My daughter ( who is 14 months) points out all the babies on each page as I read the rhyming text . So maybe you are thinking ” What’s so great about babies and text that rhymes?” nothing, that isn’t what makes this book so awesome. I love this book because of it’s diversity, inclusion, and acceptance of all babies and families. The illustrations are full of depictions of all sorts of families showering their smallest most precious member with love . What I adore about the diversity of the illustrations is that readers are left to put whatever assumption we wish on the families in the book. What I assumed were two mommies my husband thought was a husband and wife, I thought a lady was a grandma and my son said it was just a older mom. This is why I love this book, my 14 month old doesn’t see why this message is outstanding, what she does see is all sorts of happy babies in all sorts of families being the norm and this is the world we want her to know.
4 Comments »
Making science fun and exciting for kids when they are young lays the foundation for the years ahead. Have a blast with this simple science experiment , it was a huge hit with my son and one of his buddies at a play date we had yesterday. I told the boys that we had a mystery to solve which powder would make the biggest eruption? That was all two 5 year old boys needed to hear.
- Gather your materials. You will need some small containers , something for your little scientists to pour the vinegar out of ( ours were little food containers used for dip), cookie sheets to keep your kitchen from becoming a mess, a and some paper and marker to make numbers. Then you will also need some baking powder, baking soda , cornstarch and vinegar. I made a little chart but we didn’t use it , they were too excited and that excitement was my goal so we just asked questions and made predictions verbally.
- Start by pouring the vinegar into a smaller container. This made it much easier to refill the cups between pours.
- Fill the containers with the powder and place in order on the trays.
- Call the kids.Have them check out the powders however they want and decide which will make the biggest eruption.
- Pour ! #1 was baking powder which has baking soda in it so it bubbled over ( more than I expected ) but it didn’t erupt.
- #2 was cornstarch and both boys declared it a “Dud” .
- #3 was the grand finale and it didn’t disappoint.
- After the experiment was over they played and poured until there were no more bubbles to be had.
They were chattering so quickly to each other about droids and potions and giggling it was hard to catch what they were pretending it all was, but it was clear they were having a ball. After the play date was over my son asked to do more science at play dates. I am more than willing!
Many moons ago ( ok 2003) I was student teaching the 6th grade ( yes most were taller than me) and I was teaching a unit on the book Holes
- Gather your materials. You will need some paper, a marker, a book and a dot paint marker .
- Before calling your child to play flip through the book and choose some words. I only chose each word once, and did one for every two pages so I could read it out loud to him at a normal speed without him having to stop too often to bam the paper. With one kid I just had a sheet to fill, not a bingo format.
- Start reading.
- It was a hit from the start . I will be doing this with many other books in the future.
- Bam!
- When he missed a word I invited him to look for it in the book.
- Got it!
Making reading a game has been a big part of my son’s ease into reading. Still even now that he is reading well he doesn’t always want to read books to my husband or I opting to read to his sister or alone. Building confidence is tricky. Instead of forcing them to read aloud when they don’t want to , play some games and let the fun build the confidence. After their confidence builds they will be much more apt to read aloud .
I use this activity to help my kindergartener son practice his spelling words. Because let’s face it, memorizing things isn’t fun for young children. Since my 3 year old daughter thinks she should do everything her big brother does, I adjusted this for her to practice her letters, numbers, and writing practice.
All you will need to do this simple activity are paper and crayons. That’s it.
I drew an upper and lower case A for my daughter and her friend. But we also did a couple of numbers and threw in some shapes, too.
Have your child trace the letter, shape, or number with any color crayon. As they are tracing it have them say it out loud, too. For letters we say the letters and then say the sound they make. For shapes we will say the shape and then say something that is that shape. You get the idea.
Have them trace over the object again with a different color crayon.
Then have them repeat it again with another color, and so on until all seven colors of the rainbow are used.
Our friends had a little trouble getting the idea at first, they wanted to draw another one next to the one I had drawn. But with a little bit of guidance they saw that it would make that one a rainbow and then they were eager to do it.
Now you have a rainbowed letter (or number or shape).
This is a very easy way to get your child to do repetition without making it seem like doing the same thing seven times. It is great for handwriting and pencil grasp practice, along with recognition of letters, shapes, numbers, and colors. It really is a lot of fun and your refrigerator will soon be covered with rainbowed objects. Just a warning.
Kim is a contributing writer for No Time For Flash Cards, a mom to a toddler, a preschooler, and a foster parent, too. She juggles her day by trying out fun activities and crafts with the kids. After all, she is just a big kid herself. See what she has been up to over at Mom Tried It.
When I suggested this idea to my son for the Tinker Lab Paper Bag Challenge he bolted to the playroom to start finding supplies. One problem his sister was napping and I’d worked hard to get her to sleep, I wasn’t about to wake her with the sounds of exploding bags. So we waited until this weekend and to say it was worth the wait is a total understatement. Our Love Bomb was fun to do and the end product was even cuter than I thought it would be.
- Gather your materials. You will need some paper bags, scrap construction paper, a canvas or heavy paper,contact paper, white glue, scissors and/ or a hole punch.
- Start by cutting your scrap paper into small pieces.
We used scissors and a hole punch.
- Pop them in the bags. We made 3 bags with a handful of confetti in each.
- Make a heart with contact paper.
- Pop the heart on the canvas. spread glue all over the canvas. Make sure there is lots along the edge of the contact paper. Forgive the photos, my camera dove to the floor on Friday and my new one hasn’t arrived yet. Thank you apple for my iPhone camera!
- Time for some confetti explosions, you might want to do this outside.
- Blow it up
- Smack it as hard as you can. It took us a few tries and we practiced earlier.
- Bam! Some of the confetti will fly out but you still have to give it a little shake to get it all.
- After all have been popped, gently push the confetti that are on the heart to the edge. Let dry for only a few minutes then peel off the heart.
- Let dry over night.
Pretty cool right? We had so much fun, just hearing the giggles that emanated from my son was enough to do this again and again!
Check out the other creative uses for paper bags at Tinker Lab.
23 Comments »
