Be A Word Explorer

Spice up your child’s vocabulary by using your very own be a word explorer word pointer, and help make learning new words a wonderful everyday adventure. With a decorative word pointer in hand, your child can explore the house and discover new and amazing words. This is a great opportunity for your child to practice writing and reading, while building a bank of new words. Being a word explorer can even help make studying for school spelling tests fun and engaging. Everyday is a great day for discovering new words, so get out there and be a word explorer!

What You Need:

• Post-It Notes 
• Thin black marker
• Decorating supplies: stickers, ribbon, pipe cleaners, dry pasta, decals, sequins, paints, colored construction paper, tissue paper, etc. 
• Various objects to be used as pointers: rulers, clean fly-swatters, long-handled ice-scrapers, wooden spoons, dowels, cardboard tubes, back scratcher, etc. 
• Glue and tape 

What To Do:

1. Using the marker and post-it notes, help your child label common objects around the house: window, door, plant, couch, towels, light switch, sink, television, dishwasher, curtains, etc. As you stick on each label, be sure to have your child read the word back to you.

• If your child would like to have more of a challenge, as you are labeling the items in your home, have her spell the word, use the word in a sentence, or even give a definition of the word.

2. Help your child decorate an assortment of objects to be used as pointers. For example, paint a card board tube all the colors of the rainbow and glue sequins on it to make a sparkling rainbow, or take a wooden dowel and twist different colored pipe cleaners around it. 

3. Other wonderful ideas:

• Use scissors or a sharp cutting tool to cut a large, square window out of the flat “swatter” portion of a clean, unused fly swatter (cut the window opening about the same size as the post-it notes). Decorate the rest of the fly swatter with stickers and other small decorations to create a window-to-words pointer.

• Paint a cardboard tube brown or black and create a word finding telescope. Decorate the cardboard tube with wagon wheel pasta to simulate the focus knobs on a telescope. 

4. Store the pointers in a handy, special place, such as a tall gift box decorated with markers and garnished with stickers or sequins. An umbrella stand can also make excellent holder for your word pointers. When family and friends come to visit, have your child select a pointer, and take your guests on a reading exploration of the house.