How Marley is learning her ABC's

Iwant my girls to learn, but I want them to enjoy their learning? Is that too much to ask out of life?

So as many of you know, I used to help out with the Reads program at the local school. I would sit for half an hour, listen to a child read, look up a couple words in the dictionary, talk about what she/he read. If there was time left ver we would often play a learning game together.

This is a game board I made up from a set of games which all shared the similar board at Reads. This is just a generic board game for a multitude of games. Each plain colored spot is just a spot to land on or jump on. The holiday spots are go-agains. The rainbows are slides.

This game is one Marley made up, which works pretty much the same as mine, except that you can climb the ladder to skip all the start stepping stones. And I follow Marley to see how far I can move at any one time, since she pretty much makes up where we go and when. lol.

Here are three cards, one card of each of three different games that go with the board. One is a "Bb". This is a game where we recognize the letter. If we get the letter correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can move.

The next one reads "It snowed on the grass." Reading is not a requirement of this game. All we are doing is counting words. It gives her an understanding of how letters form words and how you can tell what a word looks like being separate from another word. Again, if we are correct we turn the card over to see how many spaces we can go.

The last card reads "pillow". For this game there must be at least one reader. The object of this game is to say the word and figure out how many syllables are in the word. So I would say pillow. Marley would clap pil-low and say 2. We would turn the card over. If two is the answer the card will tell her how many spaces to move ahead.

The first person to reach the end of the game wins and the exercise is over. You can do this with basically any basic english or math skill.

For a 4th grader, you might do a game using cards for affixes for example...

"Which means to pay again?
repay unpay copay"

You could use this game for times tables, or practicing addition facts. recognizing shapes, etc.

You could practice sight words.

You could work on history facts.

The list is endless how you could use a game board like this to make memorizing or learning into fun.