Day 177- Summer Learning

Excuse the quality of these pictures but full on laziness had set in by the time I decided to take them.  It was hot in here most of the day (thankfully the air conditioning is fixed now!) and I didn't feel like doing too much.

Since R has shown such an extreme interest in reading and spelling lately I thought I would take advantage and create some activities for him to work on this summer.  He does so much better when he's fully engaged in something so I figured it would help behavior wise too.  I picked up a simple early reading book at Target while we were out shopping yesterday.  I went through the book and wrote down any words that showed up frequently, sight words and any other key words in the story.  I then took a 5x8 foam card and traced some large magnetic letters and spelled out the words.  Here is what they looked like.

I traced the magnetic letters instead of just writing the letters out so that R could easily place the actual letters over my traced letters.  This is the part of the "game" that he likes the most and he is a perfectionist so the letters and card had to match perfectly.

For his first book B is for Books! we have about 14 to 16 words to work on.  The list includes: come, books, kind, all, of, again, about, me, for, from, is (to name a few).  R loves to read his new book and then practice his cards and spelling the new words.

Here is the way we store everything when R isn't using it.  He loves to put everything in its place so this was a good solution.

Another helpful hint in case anyone was planning on doing this activity is to put the name of the story on the back of the card.  I'm thinking once we go to a new story there will most likely be words that overlap from book to book.  I can just look at the back of the card and see if that word is included in that book or not.
So I guess now you know how truly nerdy we are in this house.  My goal was to get R to sit and do this activity for at least 15 minutes a day.  Of course he has surpassed that because he is obsessed with all things related to letters and reading.  I'll keep you posted on how he does in the days to come but since he's already learned many of the words on the list I think he'll do just fine.  Next up is to find something for C to work on.  That might be a tall order!