Follow the Yellow Brick Road

At the end of our last school year we read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (which is a free kindle download on Amazon.)  The girls really love our chapter books and enjoyed the adventure we took together to the Emerald City.  Before we started reading it I added the movie to our library queue so we could watch it for family movie night when we were done.  Sadly, it took 7 months for it to finally be our turn so it was just a bit delayed.  We got our movie on Thursday so I figured Labor Day weekend would be the perfect time to watch it.

We all snuggled up on the sofa for family movie night and watched the movie as the girls eyes lit up and they squealed with delight as each new song was sung.  We compared and contrasted the differences between the book and the movie as we enjoyed the silly antics of the scarecrow, tin man, and cowardly lion.  The girls loved the good witch and thought she was SO beautiful!  It was such a fun evening and great to remember watching this as a young girl with my family.  I'd definitely recommend the Wizard of Oz to anyone else starting out in chapter books with their kiddos.

Now we're on to our next chapter book adventure... it's hard to believe  the girls will be reading them on their own before long. 

Very Silly Sentences

Last year the girls got Very Silly Sentences for their 5th birthday. I didn't think they were ready for it last year, so it remained unopened.  Since the girls are now starting to read a bit I decided it might be a good idea to pull it out for our Friday Funday. 

The game has 2 sides and I decided we would play the shorter version of the game so they wouldn't need to get as many words.  The only problem was, without the prepositions the sentences weren't always structured correctly.  I think next time we'll do the other side so the sentences make more sense. 

The girls needed help reading some of the words, but they really enjoyed it and laughed at all the silly sentences we created.  The paper dice doesn't land on all the sides well since the sides aren't all that straight so we played where they got a card for every turn.  They got the color for the area of the board they were on and then when they only had a space or two left I just had them choose one they needed on their turn.  I wanted the focus to be more on building sentences and sounding out words as opposed to being frustrated that it was taking forever to finish.  It worked well and everyone was happy and got a little intro to proper sentence formation.