Putting words in jail

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Permalink Reply by Debra on February 27, 2009 at 10:06am

I am recycling cards too, so I refuse to mark them up.

What I did with my oldest, and will undoubtedly repeat, is that after we put a word in jail (which he loves), we grab a couple of dry erase pens, and he gets to write the word on a window. Then, with another color, he does the whole circling the offending letter bit.

He loves getting to write on the windows :) and I try to make that something that he only gets to do for "special" reasons.

Dh hates this though... so we make sure the windows are wiped off before he comes home. (He has never told me I can't let them write on the windows... and now that he rarely sees it, he doesn't complain about it either...)

We've switched to paper at the moment though, as my daughter (just turned 3) seems to be getting some bad ideas from watching her brothers write on the windows. I need her to be a bit older before we resurrect this practice again.

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Permalink Reply by Bobbi on February 27, 2009 at 10:25am

We use our art colored pencils (Prismacolor) to mark them. It's not a bright yellow but it does show. It will erase from the cards.

We've also used colored wet erase markers to do this on a white board. Since they are wet erase, as long as you give them a second to dry they don't rub off very easily so you can do a few steps around the same word and not make it unreadable like happens with dry erase markers.

Bobbi

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Permalink Reply by Kristie Richardson on February 27, 2009 at 10:49am

I use white index cards and have my kids write the words on the index cards and circle them and then they can draw funny face or something around what they circled. My kids love that plus it never hurts to write a hard to spell word that doesn't fit the rules as it will help them remember how to spell it later.

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Permalink Reply by Merry on February 27, 2009 at 1:25pm

We build the word with tiles on our magnetic white board, then they can circle the letters on the board. We also magnetized our jail, so we can put the jail right over the top of the naughty tile-word!

Merry :-)

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Permalink Reply by HeatherH on February 27, 2009 at 6:44pm

Aha! A magnetic jail! Perfect!

Thanks for all the responses - they've been very helpful in getting my brain "unstuck"!

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Permalink Reply by Sandy on April 30, 2009 at 12:57pm

That's what I did as well. I reduced the size of our jail till it's just a bit bigger than the word card. (Yes, cutting out the bars was a trick!) It stays permanently on our board. DS loves putting the words in jail and often takes them out of the box so he can put them back in jail!

(We don't mark the cards. I've laminated them and we probably could, but I think putting them in jail allows him to make the rule-breaker connection.)

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