Reading (or Vocabulary) Charades

My 5 year old is THIS close to reading. He gets the basic gist, can sound things out well, but struggles with paying attention long enough to do so on words he doesn't already recognize or that are too long.  He has a fair number of easy sight words under his belt.  Things like "up" and "is" and "and" are pretty well integrated.  Unfortunately, he is completely uninterested in books at his level.

The books he wants to read, of course, are his sister's Goosebumps series, which were popular with her during the "spooky halloween" stint.  He wants spooky books, too!  We didn't have any spooky books at an appropriate level.  Or even mildly spooky books.  Or even a book about vampires.  So I looked around online and found these easy-to-read spooky tales and ordered a few from amazon, but they were still beyond him.


Finally, after struggling all weekend on 3 pages  of the level 2 Star Wars book that he was enthralled with (he loves those droids... and really all robots), he gave in and let me try easier books with him but he wants to pick them.  Does he pick them in order?  Noooooo, that would be too easy!  Anyway, I got him to a point that I can work with him on it, at least.  In order to give him some success with reading, I decided I'd start with reviewing the harder words on flash cards.  Many of these he could say on the first guess, and others were harder for him to decipher.  After adding each word, I had him go through all the previous words he had done, pointing to each word as he said it, until we had all the tricky words practiced multiple times.  Next, I planned to have him read the book, but he kept getting caught on a few of the words.  Instead of just pushing through, I thought maybe doing something with a bit of kinesthetic sense added in would help him to remember the words more easily.  So, I came up with the idea to have him act out each word after saying it.  I held all the cards myself and would show him one and he had to say the word and then act it out.  Of course, this lead to giggling by both of us and I think he had a great time with his final practice for the words.  Some of the words (like pond) were harder to act out than others, but that just really added to the creativity and fun.  It also made sure he knew what words like "trot" meant, since it's not a word that comes up in our daily lives too much.  I think this would also work great in a classroom, and could even be fun into the upper elementary grades for spelling or vocabulary words.

When we finally read the book, he flew right through it, only getting mildly stuck once.  WOOT!

The Sneaky E

This past school year, I have been working in my kid's tiny school, helping out teaching various things.  One day, a few months ago, I was working with the kids on labeling various classroom items and this required sounding out the words.  Every time, the silent e on the end of a word caught them up, so I realized they needed a bit of an explanation on what the silent e does.  After a moment of thought (and completely on the fly...) I realized that I could make this concept interesting by describing the silent e as being a little bit sneaky.  Kids love when things are sneaky!  So I explained that on the end of some words, there's a "sneaky e" and it pokes the vowel and makes it say it's name.  So, it pokes an O and make's it say "OH!" or maybe it pokes an A and makes it say "AY!"  The kids thought this was pretty funny and thus went about focusing on finding the "sneaky e's" and discovering what letter it could be poking!.

The concept has really stuck with my almost-5-yr-old year old son.  He LOVES those sneaky e's!  It's been months and he still talks about the sneaky e and laughs about how they poke the other letters.  Earlier this week, he was practicing some of his sight words and we realized that the sneaky e on the end of the word "have" was not doing it's job.  This was hilariously funny to my son.  He looked at me very seriously and said "I have an idea.  We could write the words and then draw an arrow going from the sneaky e to where it pokes the other letter!"  I got him some paper and this is what he did:

The most interesting thing to me, though, is that he is normally pretty averse to doing any fine motor development, but was willing to write this.