When I wrote A Nace’s Adventure, my inspiration came from teaching. I wrote the book for my nieces and nephews when the majority were about the age of 4. I thought that this would be the perfect age to introduce the concept of rhyme and so I sat down to brainstorm some ideas for how I could teach the concept of rhyme to young, preschool-aged children. From this brainstorm, A Nace’s Adventure was born.
Since then, I have created an accompanying Activity Book that you can download for free to help you teach rhyme to your children or students as you read this book. I want to share some ideas I had as I was creating the Activity Book. As always, I hope my ideas will inspire even better ideas in you.
-My four-year-old really enjoyed the coloring sheets. While hands are coloring, it is a good idea to ask simple questions like, “What did the nace eat before he turned into an airplane/fly/boot?” Let them look at the book if necessary (unless they have read it a dozen times, then they may have it memorized). You could even challenge them to draw pictures of the rhyming words (or if the children are older, they could write the actual words) on the pages (I left plenty of white space just for such activities). Or while your child is coloring the picture of the nace, you could ask her, “What made the nace change back to himself again?”
-My 7-8 year-olds enjoyed the Word Search while their younger brother was coloring. They all three found the words with moderate difficulty (not so difficult that they got discouraged, yet not so easy that they breezed through it). You may even challenge them to color-code the words that rhyme (for example circle “seal” and “peel” with a blue marker).
-The “Catch the Match” worksheet is simple for readers, but many children will not catch the second sentence in the instructions (I like to put something extra in the instructions to reinforce the idea to ALWAYS READ INSTRUCTIONS!—maybe one day it will catch on and the world will be a better place…). You will know they didn’t read the second sentence when they get to the word “adventure” and complain that they can’t find a match for it. For added brain value, you can have your children make each line a different color as they match the rhyming words. To add to your language discussion, you could also point out which rhymes have the exact same letter endings and which ones are different. For example, aardvark and tree bark both end in “ark.” But fruit and boot end with the same sounds but have very different spellings.
-I included a pretty basic 10-question comprehension quiz in this packet. I know that test-taking is not fun but it is a fact of academic life, so I wanted to include an activity where kids can “show what they know” and I tried to make the questions relevant and some of the answer choices a little funny so they would enjoy reading them. When you are printing these two pages, you may want to print them so that this page is two-sided instead of two separate papers. If your child is younger, you could ask these questions to him as if you were on a game show or you could just use them as discussion topics and instead of giving the canned responses, let your child answer each question his own way.
-At the end of the activity book, I have included a concentration game. I included directions on one of the sheets. Once your cards are made, you should have two extra book cover cards. If you only want to use the cards to play the concentration game, you will not need those cards. But if you would also like to use the same cards to play a variation of “go fish,” you can use that card either as a “wild” or the equivalent of an “old maid” card. There are many possibilities here and I think they could be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, fights break out every time we pull these cards out, so no games last beyond one or two rounds before I have to tell them to put them up and we’ll try again tomorrow. But my kids keep asking to play with them, so that is a good sign, right?
I hope these help you in your efforts to teach your children! If you have more ideas or if you think the Activity Book is missing a crucial activity that you’d like to see in the future, please let me know!
Love reading this.. great ideas
Thanks! Thank you for your visiting!