Play Games Where Light Reading is Required

My husband and I are out here in Indianapolis with our son. Last night his friend came over and brought a game; Apples to Apples. It was fun and easy. But, it made me think that another great way to mix reading and fun is to play games that require some light reading for your kids. If you know of any such games, please comment on them. I will also keep my eyes open when I get to a store.

One game I do know of that children like to do are "Word Searches." If you can't find a simple enough one, it's easy to make your own.

Another one you can make yourself is what I am just making up right now, but there probably is a similar thing you can buy. I'm going to call it "Silly Sentences." Make your own word strips with a "noun," a "verb," an "article," and an "adjective." Write up several and have them choose one of each to make a "Teeny, Tiny Story."

Refresher on the above terms:
Noun: a person, place or thing - (teacher, school, book, etc.) Also any names of people or places
Verb: an action word (walk, dance, study, etc.)
Article: "a" and "the"
Adjective: anything that describes something - (colors, sizes, hard or soft, light or dark, etc.)

Sample story: The purple giant danced!
(for the verbs, can use all forms - dance; danced; dancing)

To make even more interesting stories for this game, you may want to add "prepositions."
Preposition: over, under, by, in, out, on, off. To know if it's a preposition, imagine a box and think where you could put a toy in relation to this box, and that word is a preposition!

Now, if we played with prepositions, our story above could be made longer by adding a preposition and another adjective and noun.

The purple giant danced in the tall, gray, rocky cave!

Above, all three descriptive words are adjectives: tall, gray and rocky. Your little ones are not too young to learn some of these English terms as they are learning how to read. Not all of them at once, of course. I would start with nouns, they are the easiest to identify.

Doreese