Monster Trucks and Magnets

Joe was walking around today with a monster truck, wreaking havoc on any surface he could and scattering paper, remotes and toys everywhere.

Rather than taking it away, I took the opportunity to combine his play with learning to build words.

I scattered magnetic letters on the table and pulled out a list of words from the Bob Books we have been working on. Then, I asked Joe to use his truck to build each word on the list.

He was able to identify a few of them like ‘on’ and ‘end’. Also, he did a great job building all of the words, using his truck to push them together with crash sound effects–a must when driving monster trucks.

He wanted to use a marker after that, so I pulled out his favorite dry erase marker and a word matching sheet.

First, we read Book 3 introducing a few new words.

Then he matched the words on the sheet.

He completely understood what we were doing, so I let him work on his own while I played a magnetic shape game with Jacob–who impressed me with his mad skills of matching both shape and color.

All their attention spans allowed was 30 minutes, but it was a productive and fun half hour of playing and learning.