The series we are using is Word Family Stories and Activities; we’re currently about halfway through Level A (Canada) (US). Each word family contains various simple exercises (matching words to pictures, fill in the blank, etc.) and a short story, and they are pitched at just the right level for Gareth at this time:

Gareth’s favourite part, though, is the cut-out word slider included at the end of each word family. At this level, most of the 10 or so words on the slider are C-V-C (consonant-vowel-consonant), but a few blends or unusual words (e.g., knit) are sometimes included:

Here’s the sliders from all the word families we’ve done so far. Gareth is soooo pleased with himself with all the words he can now read. He likes to read them to Dad in the evening:

Do I think this is necessary to teach Gareth to read? No, not really. There are many ways to learn to read, and I think the most important part is being read to regularly, a wide variety of fiction and non-fiction, so as to instil a love of books and reading. But I see no harm in this activity. He is freely choosing to do it; he loves having some seatwork for homeschool “just like Daegan”; and it is helping him see patterns in words—and I am a huge fan of seeing patterns in things (words, math, science, art, nature, etc). Here, we “offer, but don’t force” learning opportunities on our kids. IMNSHO, there is no point in “forcing” him to learn to read, but him hating the process and hence hating to read. That’s winning the battle but losing the war.

Do you think he’s feeling good about himself and this activity?

For Gareth, I wrote colour words on one side in white crayon, and then again on the back in pen. I had him read (or sound out) the colour word, and then flip the card over and use the correct watercolour to make his card:

After a while, Gareth also asked for some number cards, so I made him the following:

Daegan asked me for some harder questions, and suggested the following:

For Gareth I also did shape words:

and told him they were shape words. With that clue, he guessed that the one starting with a “T” was triangle. I told him to colour and check for himself:

The last thing I tried was an opposite pair, ‘happy’ and ‘sad’. I started with ‘sad’ as I knew Gareth could sound out that word to read it, and then he flipped and coloured to reveal. Ditto for ‘happy’:

And, of course, this activity would not be complete without the boys creating their own wax-resist, watercolour art. Any guesses as to what they drew?

Have fun with this idea at home, and if you think for some other neat uses for this technique, please leave me a comment.

I began giving each boy 1 stick. “What can you make?” I asked. We quickly found out the answer: not much with only 1 stick! You could make 1 (one), I (capital ‘aye’), or l (lower case ‘ell’). That was about it. I then gave the boys a second stick. “What can you make now?” Here’s some of the possibilities, both letters and numbers:

Note that the final two shapes could also be symbols: the equal sign, or the plus (adding) or times (multiplying) sign.

With three sticks there were even more letters and numbers, and our first shape. Here are some of them:

And with four sticks we could make a couple of shapes, and more:

I threw out words like ‘quadrilateral’ and ‘rhombus’, and pointed out that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Gareth decided he’s played enough and wanted to do some drawing, but Daegan was keen add more sticks. We focussed on shapes from here on in.

With five sticks, a pentagon:

At this point we abandoned the paper underneath, as it was sliding around and making it harder than it needed to be to place the sticks in position. I told Daegan that another shape you could make with 5 sticks was a star, and showed him how to do it, using the interior angles of the pentagon as a guide:

With six sticks, Daegan got very excited about hexagons. “I know where we see those in nature! In a beehive!” And he started flapping his arms and buzzing like a bee:

He then opened the nearby cupboard and got out some Crispex cereal, another hexagon. It got gobbled up nanoseconds after I got this shot:

We then played around making shapes inside the hexagon (as we had done with the star in the pentagon), and found this:

Note that as these are all equilateral triangles, we can use this image to prove that the interior angles of a hexagon add up to 720 degrees. (Each angle in the triangle is 60 degrees, as 60 x 3 = 180 degrees, which is the number of degrees in  a triangle. Since two angles from each triangle are used to make the interior angles of the hexagon, and there are 6 triangles, you get 6 x 120 = 720 degrees). I did NOT do this with my seven year old in case you are wondering!

We quickly made a heptagon (7 sides), talking about how you don’t often see that shape anywhere, and moved on to the octagon. Daegan had an idea right away to complete the image:

Have fun with this activity; it’s quite flexible and can be adapted to different ages and abilities.

He began by putting the numbers in order, like on a number line:

And then he added the correct word below each number. As Gareth is at the ‘sounding out’ stage of reading, I helped him with this part, such as putting the three number words that start with ‘T’ together so that he could more easily figure out which went with 2 (or 3, or 10).

Once all the cards were laid out in order, we read the words together. I did this to make the concentration / memory game easier for Gareth, a sort of quick primer. I then shuffled and laid out the cards, face down:

I ended up adapting the conventional rules after a while, and allowing cards turned over to remain turned over. When either a number or word matching one that was already turned over was flipped, I stopped Gareth and asked him to find the match. The point of this game was the literacy skills, after all, not the memory work.

To finish off, I gathered all the word cards and had Gareth read them to me (with help), leaving the number cards on the floor. I then asked him to pass me the number cards so as I could put them away, but did so via riddles, which he loved. “Pass me the number of people in our family” (4), “Pass me how old you are” (5) “Pass me the number of legs a spider has” (8), etc. Felt a bit like Mary Poppins there in the clean up. “For every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find that fun and –snap!—the job’s a game!”

I am going to make similar cards to support his early literacy on colours (word, coloured blob) and animals (dog, pic of dog; cat, pic of cat, etc.) but I’d love other suggestions! Or other ideas to incorporate play / games / riddles into his learning to read.