Fun with Words

We have a little institution that we try to, well, institute several times a week that we call "Daddy school." This is a combination of educational endeavors generally engaged in as a family in the coziness of the evening. Generally quite a bit of math and science (aimed mostly at the oldest two) and a little reading, sometimes some fun games. Good stuff.

Tonight after working our way as a group through an interesting puzzle in Ria's math book, I pulled out a little grammar supplement that I thought the kids would enjoy. Little did I know how much that would be the case!

We've only worked our way through a few pages and instead of doing written work with a dictionary, it's more of an oral group effort. The book is titled "Smart Starters: Language Arts" and it has a little exercise sheet each day that are intended to improve vocabulary. Well, as usual, we tend to use these sorts of resources all wrong. As I mentioned above, we just played with the exercises orally and we're using it for all the wrong ages, but that was part of the fun - seeing where the kids could guess a meaning from the context, joking about different words that sounded similar, and, well, laughing a lot.

Here are two samples of the exercises we did:

Could you barbecue a query?

Name two places you would like to sojourn. (These kinds were fun because I would give my own examples first and the younger ones could guess the general idea from the context.)

(Emphasis in the original).