Next up: Command cards. According to my book
, this is a pre-reading exercise, as the child (in this case First Daughter) will learn to recognize the words and put them into action before she has learned phonics. I like a combination of phonics and sight-reading when learning to read. As a great many of these are easy phonics words, I'm not too focused on getting First Daughter to learn to sight-read these. First Son can already read, so I'm certain he will read them out loud before she has much of a chance anyway.I like these cards more for their its rainy day activity potential. So I stuck to shorter commands and even spent some time looking online for other ideas. It is shockingly hard to find a list of action verbs online. You'd think someone would have just listed a bunch of them (and now I have). I did find this fun post with some animal action and sound suggestions.
Our list (so far)
be quiet
climb
come here
dance
flap
hop
jump
lie down
march
roar
roll
run
shake
sing
sit
sit down
skip
stand
stomp
swim
talk
tap
walk
yell
There are so many ways to expand this game by encouraging the kids to think up their own commands. We may even make more cards in the future. (I just used the poster board left-over from some of the other activity preparations so I ran out of cards before I ran out of ideas. In particular, I wish I'd thought to put some chicken verbs like cluck, peck or strut.)I may also introduce these cards by reading Kites Sail High
with the kids first. I'm not planning to start any formal grammar lessons yet so we'll see.
