Celebrating Children’s Book Week with Osmo Words

To celebrate Children’s Book Week, we invited Charnaie Gordon of Here Wee Read to share how she uses Osmo Words with her young readers.

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This week we’re using Osmo Words to help us celebrate Children’s Book Week (April 30th – May 6th).  As a mom of two budding early readers, it’s important for me to incorporate daily reading into our daily lives as much as possible.  In addition to reading books and children’s magazines, we also use educational apps like Osmo Words.  I love that my children, (currently ages 4 and 5), can play alone, competitively, or cooperatively to find the missing letters for words displayed in a picture.  With Osmo word games for kids, they learn how to spell words and think critically about them.

I usually pull out a variety of different books and a white board while the kids are playing Words.  My daughter likes writing the words down on the board and my son takes on the job of trying to find some of the words shown on the screen in the books.  The process of writing the words down and locating them in books helps to develop and reinforce their writing and spelling skills.

Another fun thing to do we like to do is play different vocabulary games.  For example, I ask my daughter to write down 5 new spelling words on index cards that she learned while playing Words.  Then I ask both her and my son to think of a sentence using the new words – e.g. “The dog crossed the road.” Sometimes the sentences make sense, but sometimes they don’t, which makes it more funny!

I also like how the difficulty level increases as you continue to play Words.  In the beginning, the words are pretty easy like cat, dog, sun, etc.  But as you progress to the more difficult levels the words and hangman-like puzzles are harder to guess, which is great for challenging young minds!

Your turn: I’d love to hear how some of you use Words in your home or at your school.  Feel free to share in the comments below.