We are not flashcard people. So I say, anyway. In reality, of course, my daughter loves flashcards. This is because we – I mean I – am not a flashcard person.
On our recent trip we got the Bob Books Sight Words for the airport. I wasn’t really trying to sneak homeschooling into the long, interminable airport wait, really I wasn’t. Really, I was just trying to pass the time. And what better to pass the time than reading? We went to the book store and found that the sight words books also contained flashcards. Of course, my daughter was delighted.
A few days after we got home, she had read two of the books in the package and interest was waning. Even if the book is under ten pages long, reading a whole book or an entire sentence is still quite tiring to her. We embarked on a flashcard game.
We did flashcard fishing. We made a fishing line out of pipe cleaners twisted together. You could also use a fabric scrap with a pipe cleaner at the end. I sat on the floor and she sat in a chair, and she threw her line into the “water”. I attached a card. If she read it correctly, it went into her pile to keep. If she couldn’t figure it out or read it incorrectly, we went over the correct pronunciation and she would throw it back in.
She loved the game, but she did need a break in the middle, since she had to go and cook her “fish” in her play kitchen. Apparently the fishing metaphor worked.
A few days after that, we read another one of the books and this time she recognized many of the sight words she had learned the day before.
Sometimes simple things work. I tend to over think my games, but really kindergarten is not that hard. I need to keep reminding myself that simple is often just right.