and bingo was his name-o.

henry has been showing a pretty strong interest in letters, sounds, and spelling. he knows some letters by sight or sound and can recognize his name when he sees it. trying to come up with fun ways to keep him interested and learning but without pushing it. i understand this interest may wax and wane. or not. i'll follow his lead.

found an alphabet bingo game. he gets excited when he gets a letter he does recognize and doesn't need help with it. he was calling out, "i'm almost going to winned!" with a huge smile and a pump of the arms. so, of course he won. the bonus is we get to bust into the piggy bank to get our 'markers'.

we've also been writing words on the chalkboard. he'll ask us what a certain word looks like so we write it out for him. then we ask if he can write it. sometimes he wants to sometimes he doesn't. he's been able to write 'H' for a while (his favorite letter) and 'E' and recently 'N' which he interestingly writes from right to left. but it looks great so i don't say anything. he's been working on his 'R' and 'Y'. the other night he asked me what his name sounded like (meaning how is it spelled) so i spelled it for him. then he wanted me to air write the letters as he tried writing each one. then he wanted to know how to spell 'headache'! i told him - then wrote it out on a piece of paper for him. i asked him if he had a headache, he said, "no, my head just hurts."!

the next word he asked for was 'cheetah' (we had watched this movie earlier that day). it's like a little window into what he's thinking about, these words he wants to try to write.

after winning two rounds of bingo he wanted to be the one to call out the letters. kind of tricky to be the caller when you don't know your letters. even trickier is being the player who gets asked, "line down, line up, line down. do you have that letter?".

he likes to play on starfall quite a bit, but if any of you have good resources/ideas/games for learning to read/write/letters/sounds we'd love for you to share them with us!

i think the journey is about to begin . . .