Grammar schoolin'
Bobbin, of her own accord, has taken a keen interest in punctuation.
Yes, punctuation. The periods, questions marks, and exclamation points that mark the end of a sentence. As we were reading a few days ago, on the potty of course (it's where we do our best "reading"), every time we came to the end of a sentence she would point to the punctuation and ask "That's not a letter. What is that letter?"
So we've launched into learning about punctuations. I've zeroed in on Exclamation Points, or "Exciting Point" as Bobbin likes to call them, and Question Marks, or "Curiosity Mark" in Bobbin-lingo. She came up with both terms completely on her own after hearing the explanations for what they do and why we need 'em.
So now when we read books I ask her what the punctuation is at the end of the sentence, and she'll say "Exciting Point!" and I'll say "So I need to sound REALLY EXCITED when I read it then right?" and she'll nod, and then I'll read "HOORAY! HOORAY! We're On our WAY! Our Summer Vacation STARTS TODAY!" with over-the-top excitement. It makes her giggle. And then when I get a question, I go over the top up at the end of my sentence (easy for me and my natural Canadian up speak heritage?) and she giggles more.
Today she pointed to the period and said "I don't know what that dot is. What is that dot, Momma?" I told her it's a period. "A period", she repeated. I said it was so you could tell when the sentence ended. And so ended the lesson on the period. Not one of the more interesting punctuations. When she starts to read my writing, she'll no doubt become overly familiar with the comma. Ah well. We're a ways from that.
Bobbin's been perfecting her own writing lately. She has been able to recognize all the uppercase ABC's by sight for a while now, and has added a number of lower case letters to her recognition skills recently. But she has just last week mastered the letter "R" . Each time she does it, it gets smaller and smaller. We started out writing big "R"s on the chalkboard. Then graduated to large paper, then smaller paper, then smaller letters on the paper. We have a birthday card envelope that is now completely covered in "R"s of varying sizes and directions. I need to get it framed.
In addition to "R", Bobbin has also previously mastered the letters H, O, T and is working on D, B, P (all variants of "R" in terms of stroke, that I thought I would introduce her to writing, given her mastery of probably the more complicated of the four). She's also got C and L partially covered. But one of her favourite letter games recently is to see an M in a book and turn it upside down and magically turn it into a W (or vice versa). This is fascinating to her.
Now that we've got rhymes mastered, the rhyme game usually peters out a bit faster ending in a wash of rhymes of the form
Word / KaBurd; which rhymes with absurd, which is where it degenerates to from there, although both of us are usually giggling sillily.
so our new game is the alphabet sound game. We started it tonight. Bobbin was totally enthused at this idea, as I knew she would be. The game goes like this:
1) Go down to the basement and find that big Easter basket you've always been wanting to play with but that I kept saying how it had to stay down in the basement. You can go by yourself if you want while I clear the table; I'll just turn on the lights for you. Bring it back up when you've found it and close the gate.
FREE pass ALONE to the basement. She was all over that.
2) Ok, now at school you're learning about what letter? That's right, the letter "C". And what sound does the letter "C" usually make in a word? That's right, it makes a "k" sound. So the game is that we have to go all over the house with this basket looking for things that start with a "k" sound.
We then spent 15 minutes coming up with words that start with a "k" sound. We were focusing on the hard C; not the soft C or the CH words. Although we did find a couple of those. And then off we went on our treasure hunt, shouting "K K K K K K" as we marched around the house. It was good for about 20 minutes of seeking and finding. We came back with our loot at the end of the game, and went to the living room to show it all to Tim. Bobbin pulled each item out of the basket and explained how it was a C word.
In the end we had
Camera
Clock - from her doll house
Cookies and Coffee in Cups on a tray - from her doll house
Crayons
Colouring book
The Cat in the Hat Book, because of the prominent use of the letter C throughout the story.
Cat (toy stuffed kitty)
Crown
Clapper (the plastic hand-shaped clapper noisemaker you get at sports games)
Can of Cocoa
Curious George book
Candle
Car
cone (sans ice cream)
carrot
When we'd find things that she loved that didn't start with C she immediately suggested that tomorrow would be the letter day for that word and we could collect it up with other things that start with the same letter. So I see this being a popular game.
Comments
Now she can she start learning about the proper use of "eh", as both interrogative and exclamation. She won't be allowed to get her Canadian passport until she does, eh?
Posted by Sarah on October 13, 2008 6:52 AM.Clearly we can rely on Herself to bring back the Interrobang:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
Posted by david adam edelstein on October 13, 2008 1:37 PM.