Life

So Joseph discovered Minecraft and wanted to play it. I ended up going with Minetest a free, open source near-infinite-world block sandbox game and a game engine, inspired by InfiniMiner, Minecraft, and the like. It has clients for Ubuntu, Android and several other platforms. He has loved having me go on adventures and build stuff with him. The other day we hit a bug and his character sunk a good couple hundred feet down in the game. I dug down to help rescue him and then I hit the same bug to go deeper past lava and stuff. It was pretty hilarious. I was digging what seemed like forever to get us out. I had no clue the game could go so deep. When they say near-infinite, they mean it.

Here is a picture of the castle we built and it’s surroundings. Click on the image to see the full sized version.

Joseph continually surprises us with his reading ability today head to me “Batman: Reptile Rampage.” Which is level 2 in the “I Can Read!” series but level 3 in the ATOS book level. He also read to me “Henry and Mudge and Mrs. Hopper’s House.” Which is also level 2 in the “I Can Read!” series but level 2.8 in the ATOS book level. I prefer to use AR level as a guide as I find it a better guide to compare against different books. This is pretty amazing to us because Joseph won’t enter Pre-K until next year.

Some of the things that I think have helped Joseph with his reading are:

1. We read at least two books to him daily before bed time. These books come from his collection at home (that we mostly got for free) and from library books we trade out every few weeks on Monday night. We also read him a few scriptures every night that also gives him some more advanced reading exposure.
2.  PBS shows like Word World, Word Girl and Super Why.  Sure gluing his face to the TV wouldn’t be good but when he does watch a show I feel programming like this does very well at exposing children to reading and new vocabulary.
3. Video Games. Your probably saying to yourself wait, “video games”? Yes, video games have helped encourage him to read and sound out new words. Sure some games don’t require reading but RPG’s like Twilight Princess pretty much require it and he really wanted to read all the text boxes from the villagers. I just modeled it a bit for him (played) and he wanted to be just like dad reading and playing.

At any rate, I thought I’d just share with others what worked with my family for encouraging my son to read. I hope this is helpful to someone else.