You can find many fun ways during summer at home to help your child continue school progress in word recognition and vocabulary development.
Make a Letter Tray
You simply need magnetic letters and a cookie sheet to teach letter recognition, and to play with making words. A related idea is to make a sand tray for drawing letters and words. This kinesthetic learning experience is easy with a sturdy plastic box and a bag of sand.
Use the Educator's 'Word Wall' Technique
Build your word wall on a big bulletin board, or use this idea for refrigerator words. Print the Dolch sight word list found in PDF version at About Special Education. Cover them in laminating sheets, and stick on a piece of magnet found in the craft section. Jan Brett has beautifully illustrated printable Dolch lists for each month. By grade three, children should know the Dolch words immediately by sight. Let your child practice reading them until they are second nature.
Two more good word resources the list of grade level spelling words at SFAW's Everyday Spelling and the word family cards at About Special Education. You can use your word processing program to make word cards in any size or font using these lists. Other ideas for the Word Wall are:
- Practice reading and writing a new group of words each week.
- Use a stopwatch to time your child as he reads the words. Give a star when he beats his previous time. Or, see how many words he can read in 1 minute, etc.
- Use the word cards as flash cards to practice, or make two copies and play a concentration-type matching game.
- Find ways to use the words in everyday conversation and let your child 'catch' you using them. Give a star for each time they notice the weekly words in conversation or in printed form.
- Write a word in the air with your finger and let your child guess the word. Then, let her write a word in the air and you guess it!
- Find more ideas for Word Wall activities from About Special Education.
Big Word to Little Words Game
You remember this game! It's a classic because it requires no preparation time, and it's fun. Write a 'big' word at the top of each player's sheet of paper. Set a timer and tell players to make as many words as they can find from the letters in the big word. When time's up, the player with the most words wins. An alternative to this game is to write a one-syllable word at the top of the page. Let the child list words that rhyme with the target word.
New Word Hunt
Have your child bring a new word to dinner each night. She can find it in a magazine, book, or other printed material, or it can be a word she heard that day. But, it must be a word that she doesn't know. Talk about what the word means at dinner. Parents can share new words they find too! A related game is the Letter Scavenger Hunt found at Scholastic's Summer Reading feature.
More ideas for word learning and early reading at home are available from these resources. We like the idea of cutting your child's favorite comic strips into separate frames and letting him put them in order; and, writing a root word on a sheet of paper and letting your child write as many forms of the word as he can, both from Encouraging the Young Reader: Grades 3-6.
- PBS' Between the Lions: Things to Print
- RIF Sweet Summer Reading Challenge
- Scholastic Summer Reading Counts
- Home: The Summer Learning Place by Dr. Dorothy Rich
- Summer Reading Fun at About Children's Books
- Reading Rockets 10 Weeks of Summer Reading Adventures for You and Your Kids
- Reading Rockets 6 Games for Reading
- PBS' Cleo and Theo Word Games to Play Anywhere
- WiLearns Printable Literacy Games
- Beginning to Read: Preschool through Grade Two Activities [liBBC Words and Pictures Scrapbook Printables
