It has been busy around here lately as we adopted a retired greyhound whom we needed to help nurse back to health and then getting into the groove of a new school year. The new school year and the increased work load that has come along with it has been keeping me very busy. I have a very active, some say hyper active, 6 year old so finding ways to help him learn all his sight words and spelling words has been challenging to say the least. Flash cards have always worked out to some extent but aren't really something he wants to do so I embarked on a mission to find some better ways to learn all these words, especially all those spelling words.
I found an idea for a game called Bang! which uses jumbo popsicle sticks with one word on each stick and while my son enjoyed this game he really loves to win so I eventually took out the Bang sticks and just left the word sticks but to get him to try all the words we allow him to steal our sticks if he can say the word on our stick. This is a pretty big hit but he gets tired of it quickly so it wasn't the only solution necessary, especially since I still need to worry about spelling.
Enter Scrabble Junior and a vis-a-vis marker to write the words on the board. He was not so fond of this but a friends son is enjoying this game.
On to hangman, this is the real winner in our house especially since we have a travel hangman from Melissa & Doug so we can practice spelling words in the car when we travel. Of course I don't drive while I play this with him in the car. I write the number of blanks down on the white board area and tell him the word and he has to spell it. Every wrong guess I turn over a piece of the man and I do this for all 10 spelling words (without resetting the man between words) to see if he can get all 10 words before I can hang him. This has really speeded up the process of learning to spell our words.
Of course come Thursday we do still have to do a paper and pencil practice test to make sure he can do well on his test in class. Leading up to that paper and pencil practice test I do allow him to trace the words using a dry erase marker at least once everyday to get used to writing the words, no my son does not have the neatest handwriting and this helps a lot. I either use the dry erase envelopes or nice glossy page protectors to slide a sheet with the words written out in the teacher specified font on lined paper (I finally found a font for my computer so now I can print the list out in grey for him to trace over instead of me having to write it out by hand myself, no my writing isn't the greatest... it's good but not as good as a teacher).
All of that being said since he is so active and we have a lot of homework I am going to try to find more active ways to do our studying. I'll try to keep you posted on how that goes as I just began making a list of ideas that I can try for spelling, sight words and even math.
I found an idea for a game called Bang! which uses jumbo popsicle sticks with one word on each stick and while my son enjoyed this game he really loves to win so I eventually took out the Bang sticks and just left the word sticks but to get him to try all the words we allow him to steal our sticks if he can say the word on our stick. This is a pretty big hit but he gets tired of it quickly so it wasn't the only solution necessary, especially since I still need to worry about spelling.
Enter Scrabble Junior and a vis-a-vis marker to write the words on the board. He was not so fond of this but a friends son is enjoying this game.
On to hangman, this is the real winner in our house especially since we have a travel hangman from Melissa & Doug so we can practice spelling words in the car when we travel. Of course I don't drive while I play this with him in the car. I write the number of blanks down on the white board area and tell him the word and he has to spell it. Every wrong guess I turn over a piece of the man and I do this for all 10 spelling words (without resetting the man between words) to see if he can get all 10 words before I can hang him. This has really speeded up the process of learning to spell our words.
Of course come Thursday we do still have to do a paper and pencil practice test to make sure he can do well on his test in class. Leading up to that paper and pencil practice test I do allow him to trace the words using a dry erase marker at least once everyday to get used to writing the words, no my son does not have the neatest handwriting and this helps a lot. I either use the dry erase envelopes or nice glossy page protectors to slide a sheet with the words written out in the teacher specified font on lined paper (I finally found a font for my computer so now I can print the list out in grey for him to trace over instead of me having to write it out by hand myself, no my writing isn't the greatest... it's good but not as good as a teacher).
All of that being said since he is so active and we have a lot of homework I am going to try to find more active ways to do our studying. I'll try to keep you posted on how that goes as I just began making a list of ideas that I can try for spelling, sight words and even math.
