word games
On the way home from angilong's this evening in the car, shoes_the_dog asked me "What do you call words that rhyme at the beginning instead of at the end?" I told him that was called aliteration, and explained it with the toungue twisters "six sick sheep" and "Betty Butter." He decided that we should play a game in which we each had to come up with a silly aliterative sentence for each letter of the alphabet. We laughed the rest of the way home.
My favorite was his sentence for J: "Jackhammer Josefina jacked the Jack of spades." What a brilliantly evocative turn of phrase! It led to a brief distraction from our game while we told the Story of Jackhammer Josefina, the hard-hitting cowgirl who cheated at cards.
Speaking of cowgirls (and cowboys,) we got him his first three real chapter books for him to read recently. We picked them out together and he approved all three: a puppy book, a horse book, and a dinosaur book. Sometime between when we bought them and when we were ready to start reading, someone must have told him that horse stories are for girls, because he is now throwing a fuss about the horse book. He doesn't want anyone to know he is reading it, and complains that it is dumb even though he is clearly enjoying it. He insists that no one told him, that "It's just his boy instincts." Riiiiight. So tonight we watched an old Western...you know, a story about a guy who loves horses. I think that some Zoro and Lone Ranger and re-watching Hidalgo might be in order.
My favorite was his sentence for J: "Jackhammer Josefina jacked the Jack of spades." What a brilliantly evocative turn of phrase! It led to a brief distraction from our game while we told the Story of Jackhammer Josefina, the hard-hitting cowgirl who cheated at cards.
Speaking of cowgirls (and cowboys,) we got him his first three real chapter books for him to read recently. We picked them out together and he approved all three: a puppy book, a horse book, and a dinosaur book. Sometime between when we bought them and when we were ready to start reading, someone must have told him that horse stories are for girls, because he is now throwing a fuss about the horse book. He doesn't want anyone to know he is reading it, and complains that it is dumb even though he is clearly enjoying it. He insists that no one told him, that "It's just his boy instincts." Riiiiight. So tonight we watched an old Western...you know, a story about a guy who loves horses. I think that some Zoro and Lone Ranger and re-watching Hidalgo might be in order.