Christopher and Building Vocabulary Words

Christopher who is now four years old has been reading pretty fluently for about a year now. The interesting thing with Christopher that was different with Andrew is his motivation for reading and learning new things. Things for him have to be his idea or he loses interest. Sound familiar? I am sure that is the case with many.

Well, I have been wanting to build his vocabulary and have done several things but felt like sharing the most recent. Christopher has been really interested in two things these days. The color red and Cats. So, I decided to grab several books on Big Cats (lions, tigers, leopards and so forth) from the library. Well, after a few attempts to read these easy non-fiction books with him, I realized he was not really that interested in reading straight from a book so I decided to do something different.

I grabbed some letter tiles that were given to him. I will post online what they are exactly like so you purchase them if you want. I then opened the book and began to spell words from what we were reading about with the tiles. In the back of the book, there were several key words that may be vocabulary builders such as lion, tiger, rosette, leopard, pride, and so forth. He, at first did not like it but later I caught him getting it out all on his own and spelling those exact same words.

When I saw him begin to lose interest in this, I decided to make a game out of it. I asked a question from the book and then asked him to spell the word that I was thinking of that pertained to the book. For example, I asked him to spell the word that means a group of lions. He then proceeded to spell the word pride with the letter tiles. It was then his turn and he asked me to spell something from the book. This game went on for about 30 minutes and it was fun because my oldest son asked to join in. It is truly amazing how a child's attention span can be increased just by being in tune and creative on how to catch their attention. I felt success at this point because I knew that he was engaged. Yay! Once again, my mission completed. He learned some new vocabulary. It will be fun to see what else I can do to continue this mission of mine.