Combining Literacy and Play

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Santa Claus brought the boys this really cool treehouse for Christmas.  The boys love the Magic Tree House series so we decided it might be fun to play with the tree house and read a story at the same time.  We read the Magic Tree House book Dinosaurs Before Dark (affiliate link).  Magic Tree House books are a great starter series for getting into chapter books.  We have quite a few books in the series that we collected over the years. 

I read the story aloud to the boys while they acted out scenes from the book with dinosaurs, the tree house, and a couple of knights.  We had to improvise since we don't have little boy and girl toy figures.  The younger boys played in the beginning, but eventually lost interest.  It takes an hour or two to finish a Magic Tree House book.  (We had to pause so I could make bread dough in the bread-maker too.)  The younger boys quit playing with the tree house, but still listened to the story while they made paper fish for the toy Pteranodon to eat.  My oldest who is 7 however, played the whole time and acted out every scene.  ​

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He even got in some writing practice.  Every time Jack, the boy in the story, wrote observations down in his notebook, my oldest wrote the same observations down in his notebook.

It was a fun way for us to spend a Saturday afternoon enjoying a good book together.