Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Theme of the Week: Books & Reading

My girls don't go to formal preschool, but I like to create a sort of preschool-like routine at home. We have what we call "Theme of the Week". Here is how our "Theme of the Week" works.
So each week we have a topic we focus on in addition to a letter, number, working on shapes, colors, talking about weather and the calendar, etc. So this week the theme is "Books and Reading". It becomes a great week to focus on some previously mentioned ideas, like finding sentences in books, and other misc ideas involving books. We made our theme this week fun by using "Super Why!" (PBS reading program) character masks and coloring "Super Why!" coloring pages.
We also did site word BINGO.
Because my girls are very beginner readers, we are still doing work with letters as well. To make the week fun, you can eat Alphabet cereal or soup and talk about the letters as you eat, and make alphabet sugar cookies. It is a great week to make sure you go to the library and talk about different kinds of books: board books, chapter books, dictionaries, fiction books, non-fiction books, etc. We also incorporate www.starfall.com which is a great learning/beginning reading website. If we watch a DVD it is Leap frog's "Letter Factory" which reviews the sounds letters make and is a big hit with my kids or watch "Super Why!" on PBS. We will also practice their reading skills with these great early reader books:
They are very simple sentences like "Mat sat." But it was SO great to watch my 3 year old and 5 year old reading through them. They got really exciting that they were "reading" too.

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