I’m a self-diagnosed early education nerd. I get really excited about anything connected to early learning and especially hands-on creative ideas to fit learning into play.
Recently, when purging through old toys I debated giving away our bags of large Mega Bloks. At ages 7, 5 and almost 3 my kids seemed to have outgrown our big blocks in favour of the smaller Lego bricks. However, when I put them into the giveaway pile, classicly, the kids started playing so they stayed.
Then momstown spotted this terrific idea from Filth Wizardry on pinterest and had to put it into action with my early readers! This idea also gave a new use to our old stackable blocks!
All you need are building bricks like Lego or Mega Blocks, tape or labels and a marker. I almost skipped the tape and wrote right on the blocks but I’m glad I didn’t as it will allow me to change the words as the kids reading gets better.
Start labeling with the basic repetitive “popcorn” or Dolch words that kindergarten-ers work on like: to, as, it, on, at, the etc. We used the one-by blocks for popcorn words, two-by blocks for verbs, three-by blocks for nouns and subjects. The 4 sided bricks are terrific because I could add new words easily and depending on the side shown, changed the results of the sentences. To play kids can either stack of line-up sentences to build phrases that make sense.
I was amazed at how interested our son was in this game, he doesn’t “love” working on his writing or sentence practise. Yet putting words onto the bricks was a game-changer! Suddenly, reading and sentence building is fun! There’s no delay with slow handwriting, there’s an option to “skip” a word if you can’t read it and loads of options in play. Even better, we can get a little silly creating silly sounding sentences like “the giraffe ate my breakfast on his bike”.
