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.

 Bob Books, Set 1: Beginning Readers

25 Emergent Reader Mini-Books (Grades K-1)

The Complete Book of Phonics

St. Patty's Pretzels

 I absolutely love Family Fun magazine. In the March issue I saw this creative idea for a St. Patty's Day snack. While they used yogurt covered pretzels and white chocolate for theirs, we did things a little differently.

Using the same idea, I got some candy bark (vanilla is what I found at the store, but almond is a good choice too), small pretzels, and colored sugar. I added some green food coloring to some regular sugar, but your might want to use actual decorating sugar because the grains of sugar are bigger and will look better. However, if your kids are like mine and don't care about things like that, then you should be good to go with regular sugar.

Follow the directions on the package of your candy bark to melt it. I used the microwave method and it worked great. I loaded up pretzels with coating and laid them out on the wax paper in a clover shape.

Then the boys tried to cover just the edges with the colored sugar. It was easier said ten done, as I also tried to just do the edges to match the Family Fun pretzels better. Not easy. (In their version they melt the white chocolate and then pipe it onto the edges of the pretzels and add a stem also, so the only wet part is the outer edge versus these pretzels that catch all the sugar drizzled or dumped! on them.)

 Leave them out to dry, break off the wax paper and tap off the loose sugar. We made these last night so that they could be enjoyed all day today.

 After a bowl of sugary (and lucky!) cereal as is our tradition,

I let the boys eat some of their treats.

Make sure to save some plain ones for yourself - they are sweet enough without all that colored sugar!

Find the Sentence with Dr. Seuss

 I'm not unique in saying that Dr. Seuss is magical and amazing. I love that he write books full of nonsense words that rhyme with real words. I love that he has a sort of "moral to the story" in most (possibly all?) his books. And I love the crazy characters he creates.

 The Sneetches were not nice to people that were different them, eventually learning that we are all equal no matter what we look like - star or no star on our bellies. (And also, don't worry so much about following the latest fads and trends!)

"Ten on Top" is a fun counting book with a little competition between friends.

And for some just plain old silliness (that my boys adore!), "Wacky Wednesday" is a great pick to if you can carefully observe all the "wacky" things going on on each page.

Lucky for all of us who love the books he has written either as Dr. Seuss or his other pseudonym of  Theo LeSieg, they are relatively easy to find the at the thrift stores.So, you can inexpensively build your library.

I found this fantastic site last week called Playful Learning. I've been trying to get my boys to read more and feel like I have to sort of trick them into it. When I saw her idea for a "Story Puzzle," I decided it was a good technique I must try with the kiddos!

Basically, what you do is find a sentence in a book, write it down and your child looks for it as you are reading it. Instead of cutting them up like she did, I have just left mine as full sentences, making it more of a "hide and seek" than a puzzle. We might work up to that, we'll see. 

 Even though I knew it wasn't necessary to have the sentences on sentence strip paper, I thought that would be more fun and help the boys see the way letters will look when they practice them in school. (We just practice on regular paper right now, but I also got some pads of paper at the dollar store with the lines that I think we will use soon.)

  She suggested using books with just one sentence per page, but I thought that I would rather find a book that had simple sentences, even if there were a few per page. The first book I thought of was the one and only "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" by Dr. Seuss. 

At first I wasn't sure how they would respond because a lot of times they protest when they think I am trying to teach them. I was very pleasantly surprised that not only did they like it, but they asked for more sentences!

So, I picked out a few out of another book and plan to do more. And really, I could just use only Dr. Seuss for it. The words he uses are usually good beginner reading words, but not always.

I would suggest skipping this one (and as a side note, can you quickly read this without making a single mistake?!)

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!