Boggle Jr.

My parents gave Annabelle Boggle Jr. for a "graduation" from speech therapy present on Wednesday. She LOVES it! Of course, Annabelle loves playing just about any game despite her boredom with Candyland.

The instructions that came with Boggle Jr. do not have a game with much of a competitive nature between an adult and child, so I made one up. We each get a turn rolling the alphabet dice to spell the three or four letter word on the cards. The first player to spell the word gets to keep the card, and the player with the most cards at the end of the game wins.

Shortly after we started playing the game for the first time, Annabelle jumped up to grab a piece of paper and crayon. Then she promptly wrote BEAR on a piece of paper. She wrote it clear as day! Anyone who can read could read it. She blows my mind!

She also got a lesson on chances while playing Boggle Jr. At one point in the game when we only had one letter remaining to spell the word, she realized that the particular letter was not on every die. So she decided that we only needed to roll one die. With eight dice, I pointed out to her that some of the letters were actually listed twice. Therefore, she had a greater chance of rolling that letter if she rolled both dice. It seemed as if she somewhat understood. But, it still blew my mind that she realized that we didn't need to roll all of the dice every single time.

While playing today, she wanted to cover the spelling of the word on the card to spell the word by memory alone. I explained to her that she needed to know how to spell the word in order to play in that manner. She insisted on playing the game her way. And I'll be darned if she didn't spell some of the words on complete memory alone. Then when her Daddy got home I asked her, "Annabelle, how do you spell baby?" "B-A-B-Y," she replied! I know she is learning on complete rote alone, but I'll take it. I plan to see if she can still spell baby tomorrow morning.

Oddly enough, my parenting style has never been to teach my child to read before kindergarten. I honestly don't see the point to push it. Children need to be children, and they need to most importantly focus their time on being creative at this age, not on reading. If provided with the right direction and education, children will learn to read! And, I tend to think that children who spend more of their preschool years playing will be better off and more well rounded than those who spend their time learning to read.

P.S. Annabelle knows most of her letters now. She struggled today with M, W, H, D and G, but I think she nailed all of the others down pat. I believe that some of the letters are missing from the dice though, so that list is probably not all inclusive. And honestly, I don't really know how she really learned them. I really don't put too much emphasis on it. I'll point letters out to her, but I don't have a set lesson plan every day for her to learn new letters. I think it is a lot like crawling, walking and talking. They will learn it when they are developmentally ready, and every child is completely different!