As you did with letters of the alphabet, you can. Tell students to recite the alphabet silently to themselves, or have the class recite the alphabet in unison before tackling this task.

Doodles leads the girl towards a pirate ship where they discover all the stolen all the Rs. To alphabetize a list of words or names, tell students they will start by placing them in A-B-C order according to the first letter of each word. A little girl wakes up to a world without the letter R - and sees that her FERRET Doodles has turned into FEET! How can she save him? As she races around town, she discovers all the problems without the letter R - bread becomes bead, friend becomes fiend, crows become cows. My Pet Feet by Josh Funk, illustrated by Billy Yongĭarling and creative, this playful wordplay adventure hits all the right letters, and you’ll laugh your way through it. Maybe you’ve found that there isn’t a word for something you want to name, so why not invent the word? Remembers, authors do it all the time!īut first, develop a child’s love for words and wordplay with these fantastic picture books. So a zebra + a lamb = a zamb? Then, illustrate it. Or try combining two animals to create a new one. I still can’t believe my idea of a snoff hasn’t caught on! A snoff is a sneeze + cough because a cougeeze doesn’t sound as funny, so hence, we need snoff. Then, try inventing new words of your own by combining words together. What’s fun about reading is that authors use made-up / nonsense words all the time! When you’re reading, see if you can find the author’s made-up words and guess why the authors invented those words. I mean, is it cabooi like cactus is cacti or cabooses like mooses? Kids do this all the time, and it’s so important for their language development! Just last week, I couldn’t figure out the plural of caboose. ( Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development!) That’s how language develops! And, when there are conversations with other speakers who are more advanced, their knowledge continues to increase. This is why young children get tenses and plurals wrong - they’re usually applying what they know, generalizing. Think of ways little children play with language - it might be rhymes or silly language or trying to figure out words based on background knowledge.

My own, my students, and yours!Īs children develop language, wordplay develops naturally and early. Kids will love the word play and delight in trying word play of their own. What I love about these books is that they’re fun, funny, AND inspiring to kids. C elebrate words and wordplay with playful picture books. Wordplay makes kids love language it inspires writing and helps kids learn new vocabulary.

Alphabet book with weird spelled words