A New Take on Reading

This week we're going to try something new with reading.  You know those refrigerator magnets that are just a big set of words?  We're going to do something similar.  We're going to use them to make sentences, stories, and whatever else.  I may even have my daughter lay out sentences to copy onto her paper and we'll use them to write a story.  I've got some ideas on how we're going to work it.

It all started out with some index cards I have sitting on my desk.  I bought them with the great idea of drawing pictures of colonial things and putting the words on them.  We were going to keep it very Thanksgiving related so she could know all the words by Thanksgiving.  Somewhere between having my brilliant idea and actually making it a reality, I came to the conclusion that I don't know how to draw well enough to feel comfortable with it, nor do I really have the resources to print out pictures to put on the cards.  That presents just a bit of a challenge, so I thought I would just do it later at some point.  I would get to it, I was certain.  This is a usual thing for me, and in truth, I'll never get to it.

Today I was thinking about teaching my daughter to read.  We had been talking for some time of putting all the words she knew onto cards so she could see exactly how much she knew how to read and write.  We'd add a new word each time she finished one for the rest of the year, and it would show her exactly how much progress she was making.  We both thought it would be kind of fun, but we never got to it.  Instead, it gave me a new idea.  I would use them as a story telling and reading tool!

On each card I'm going to write words she knows, words she doesn't know, but can figure out, and words she's pretty familiar with.  I'm going to divide them up into categories, people, places, things, verbs, adjectives, possibly even some adverbs.  Then we're going to go through, pick out a subject, put it together with an action, and so on to make a sentence.  After my daughter writes the sentence on the wonderful lined story paper my aunt introduced me to, she's going to draw a picture to match.  After that, we're going to talk about what happens next and pick a new set of words to make a sentence for the next part of the story.  For November, our story is going to be something about the first Thanksgiving, Pilgrims, coming to the new world, Native Americans, or something that relates to the rest of the work we're doing.  If it's a hit, we're going to revive it for Christmas next month.

I know this is probably nothing new, and tons of moms have probably thought of this before.  I'm sure that's how whoever came up with those word magnet sets thought of the idea.  Even if it's not original, I think it will be a good step to get my daughter back into reading.