My daughter, Laney, is 4. Even though she will start kindegarten next fall, I have chosen to not put her in preschool this year. I don’t know if its because I’m not ready for her to grow up, or if I don’t want to send her out in to the world yet, or if I don’t want her to be away from me that much yet, but for now, she’s home with me and my other two girls every day.
The problem is that I want her to be really ready for kindegarten. I put her in a gymnastics and a swimming class once a week to get her prepped for having to listen to a teacher and work with peers. But she is resistant to ME teaching her anything. If I want to practice reading with her, she will give in for about 5 minutes and then fight it. Its the same with anything I want to teach her. So I know I need to find other ways to sneak teaching in, which means I need to get creative.
Last night, as I thought about today, I got the idea to make a memory game with some simple words to help her practice word recognition, reading, capital vs. lowercase letters, as well as the other benefits of playing memory and games in general. It went great! She had a great time and didn’t want to stop. After a while, I started giving her one goldfish cracker for every word she could read as I held up the cards like flashcards. Again, it went great!
I whipped out two more versions: addition and subtraction. She’s not ready for them yet, but when she is, we’ll be ready. The word memory game has 48 simple words in CAPITALS and lowercase letters. You match the capitals with their lowercase counterpart. The addition and subtraction games have 46 problems and their answers. So just match the problem with the correct answer.
Just click, download or print, cut along the lines, and play!
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