I am by no means above bribery. Pretty well in all areas of my life. Kids, working out, weight loss, marriage. It’s just an incentive. We all need incentives, right?
So a part of my reading portion is providing small candies in exchange for them doing tough stuff. Like sounding out words. Let’s be clear. Learning to read can be difficult and having a little treat for doing a good job can sometimes make it seem less hard.
I was running low on skittles (P’s candy of choice) and I had on the grocery list to get something with her at the store. We went down the isle and I realized valentines day is almost here. HELLO. Cheap hearts. I mean, it’s all of P’s favorite colors.
And then I pulled them out the first day and I realized there’s a lot to do with them!
1. Bribery. Duh. P gets a candy for every 3 words she sounds out on these sound out cards I made up. She also gets one for all the sight words she can name. It’s usually around 10/day. Give it up for sugar for keeping lessons a happy time! Sometimes we can trade them in for a cookie or something.
2. Counting. One of my favorite preschool games is using some big dice that I got from the dollar store. You roll them twice and then count out candies to represent each roll and then add them all up. As they get a little bigger we write out he problems together on a white board.
3. Reading. This is where the hearts really are cool. We’ve read the sayings on here. Sure, they are uber lame, and some of them we can hardly read at all, BUT they have really short words on them that are usually easy to sound out. Plus, she now knows how to speak in text. She r smart.
4. Matching. She loves grouping skittles into the same colors. We can do that with the hearts too, but we can also match the sayings. That way she’s looking at the words and matching them with other words. GENIUS!
In other news, every time I see these candies they BEG to be put on a sugar cookie. Stop me. Stop me now.
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