cheer like a maniac.

A couple weeks back, I wrote about our book nook and instilling a sense of well being through the process of curling up with a book. Another activity that has my preschooler feeling proud these days is mastering his phonemic letter sounds. He's been working on these for quite some time as we've incorporated not just the name of the letter, but the sound it makes, into his early learning. 

He loves playing the phonemic awareness games on starfall.com (the phonemic alphabet song is FANTASTIC fun!). In recent months, I created a tiny set of flash cards (varying the size--- tiny or huge-- always seems to make the kids laugh and creates more of a gaming atmosphere in our house). Each card had a letter on it, written in capital print and lower case print. At points throughout the day, him and I sit down and go through the cards. The rules to the game? He sees the letter, says the letter sound or chooses to 'pass.' The sounds he gets correct go into a pile. The ones he passes on or misses, I say the correct sound and put them into another pile. Then, I pick up the pass/try again pile and we race through those in the exact same manner. We keep at it until all of the cards end up in the success pile. Then? We jump up and cheer like maniacs!