Green Eggs and Ham

The girls read their first book!

We've been LIVING Green Eggs and Ham at our house for about a week and a half now:

• I read the book to them, and we watched the DVD for the first couple days. Hearing the book read aloud and watching the animation of the book on DVD helped the girls become familiar with the language, rhyme, expression, and flow of the story. They didn't have to focus on the "how" of reading, they could just enjoy the book.
  

• We played a matching game with some of the unfamiliar words in the book, such as "you" and "here" and "anywhere." I made the game with 3x5 cards, writing each word on two different cards. We played it like concentration-place all cards face down, flip over two and try to make a match. Reading the word "you" is so much less intimidating when it is a single word on a white card, rather than an unfamiliar word in a sentence or page full of words.

• The girls read a couple pages of the book at a time. We took it slow. As they gained confidence they wanted to forge ahead.

• We ate green eggs and ham for breakfast. Every morning. For a week. I was only planning to make it once, but they kept asking for it. We had all the stuff, so I figured, "Why not?" Eating green eggs and ham for breakfast helped to build a stronger connection to the book. And it was fun and silly-just like the book.

• There was a prize at the end. They knew when they finished the book they they would get their very own library card. And it was the library card that did it. Those girls wanted that library card. Bad. They pushed themselves hard, they got frustrated, and one of them had a meltdown. I tried to slow things down, but these girls can be intensely determined.
  

At times it was silly, sometimes it was tasty, other times it got ugly. And that's how they read their first book.