My 2 Favorite Educational Websites for Kids

Some of the greatest moments as a parent come when your child learns something new they're REALLY excited about.  Over the last few days, Sweet Pea has learned to use a computer mouse.

This is HUGE for her because she LOVES doing the activities on the Starfall.com website...but she always had to talk her brother or sister into doing it with her to work the mouse...which also meant THEY usually got to choose exactly which activities to do.

Well she's gotten enough coordination to work the mouse, and did some Starfall last night ALL BY HERSELF!  Can't you just see how happy she is about it?!?

Me:  Do you like Starfall?
Sweet Pea:  YES!  I do it ALL BY MYSELF!  No, grown-up help ME!

DIY Learning Games in Less Than 10 Minutes

Heard at our house yesterday, "I want to play the Letter Game...the one with the yummy things!"

Candy Land is a great game to practice colors...and at our house it's also a pretty awesome game for practicing letters, sounds, and reading too.  This took about 10 minutes to do, you can undo it easily (or redo for a different skill), it was a big hit with Little Brother...and it makes Candy Land a bit more interesting for me too. 

We didn't used to have many kids' board games.  Then Firecracker got old enough to actually play them, and I realized how useful they can be for learning basic skills.  Now we've picked up several on sale or from thrift stores.  Of course some of the MOST important skills they teach is taking turns and getting along...but they can teach other things as well.

Here's what you need...Candy Land, some scotch tape, and a thin tip permanent marker (or other marker that will write on the tape.)

First, I covered the Candy Land path with tape.  I used short segments to get around the curves.

When I was done, it looked like this:

Then I put one letter on each space with the permanent marking pen, making sure to just write on the tape.  I wrote the lowercase letters because that's what children often need the most help with.  Instead of "q," I used "qu."

(When we taught Firecracker letters, we started with uppercase because we figured they were easier to distinguish...and she's turning out fine.  We've since learned, though, that it's better to practice their lowercase letters more, since you encounter them in reading so much more often than uppercase letters.)

Then we played Candy Land like normal, but we had to say the sound the letter makes when we landed on it.

Little Brother loves it!  Just the letters is almost to easy for Little Brother, though, so I think I'll take the tape off soon and add some sight words, like "the, and, that" as well as some short words for him to sound out.

Firecracker is not a huge fan of me modifying regular games for educational purposes...but she had fun with it in spite of herself.  For her we made it a bit more challenging...we had to think of a word that started with the letter we landed on. 

You could personalize the spaces as much as you want to...maybe focussing on tricky words in a unit your child is learning at school.

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