ofamily learning together

My little girl has always loved books, she has always loved story time and would often just sit and page through her books and make up her own story to go with them.  But the last few weeks her reading has just taken off.  She is now taking her old story books off the bookshelf and reading them too herself.  She is now a real book-worm (she is very proud of this fact and tells me  this on a regular basis).  And big bonus for me, big sister is loving reading stories to her brother (maybe now I will not always end up with cold half-finished cups of tea).

I really want to do everything I can to encourage this.  Naturally as she starts reading harder and harder books some of the vocab gets a bit hard for her and I do have to help with some of the words.  Madam does not like this.  She wants to be able to read her books by herself.  So I am trying to really work on her vocab, on recognising words, on understanding what they mean and yes even on spelling and writing them.  And yes this does mean that some of our planned “school activities” have been pushed aside for us to spend more time on this.  But I really want to work with this momentum and encourage my new book-worm.  As I always say I do Pencil planning !!!

To help with her vocab we have been making lots of word pictures (not sure what to call them).  We normally choose a theme and I often draw something like a cupcake or an apple tree and then she writes words inside the picture or sometimes sticks the words on the picture.  Pink loves this.  Once we have completed the picture it gets hung up on one of her learning boards.  This last week we did some autumn words.

I included the autumn word mat from Twinkl (part of the FREE downloads that you can get).  We have actually printed off a number of their word mats lately and Pink has been using them a lot when she writes.  I find that having the word mats to refer to means she is not asking me for as much help with her spelling, she first has a look at the word mats to see if she can find the word that she is battling to spell (getting closer to finishing a cup of tea before it gets cold).

With this tree I cut out some basic leaf shapes in autumn colours and the Pink wrote words on the leaves that described autumn.

I was busy baking in the kitchen when she did this one so I was very impressed with the end result.  She found that some of the words did not fit onto the leaves so she just wrote the words directly onto the paper (we had a very loud thunder-storm the previous day hence some of the words added to the tree).

She has already requested that we do more word pictures – she wants to do one about the witch on Room on the Broom and one about the farm where we go and pick vegetables. So more pencil planning for next week, more changing our planned word to encourage our little book-worm and her love for bigger words.