Welcome to this week’s Gnome Zone Challenge: Creative Names. Kids will have a chance to exercise their imaginations and build their vocabularies.
Supplies need:
- paper and a pencil or pen
Here’s what you do:
Older kids:
With parent/caregiver permission, head out to your backyard, your neighborhood, or a park. Think of creative, new names for things you find there. Let your imagination run wild and rename whatever you’d like except people.
As an example, a lawnmower could be called a “thing-that-eats-the-grass” and a tree could be a “green-thing-that-saves-the-planet.”
Ask your grownup if you can send us a photo of “your-crazy-named thing” or a short video of you with the thing and saying its crazy name to #PoudreLibraries.
Want to go tech-free? You can draw the object, write your crazy name on it, and send it in the mail to the library. Be safe, have fun, and remember social distancing is six feet!
Younger kids:
Take a walk with your child. Point out things and ask what these things are called. You can make up silly names, and ask your child if they are correct.
For example, point to a tree and ask, “Is this a snorgingorginplat?” They’ll love correcting you.
If it’s safe, let your child touch the item to get a tactile experience along with the visual and verbal. Make sure to include some things your child both knows and does not know for a fun learning experience. Be safe, have fun, and remember social distancing is six feet!
“The Why” behind the Challenge:
Why for older kids: Kids will have a chance to exercise their imaginations and build their vocabularies by creating compound words, possibly before they even understand the concept.
Why for younger kids: Kids will have a fun experience in which they exercise vocabulary recall for words they do know and learn new words for things they don’t. Younger kids are genuinely curious about the environment around them, so let their curiosity run free. If it’s safe for the child to touch whatever they are learning about, it will create a tactile memory which will reinforce their memory of the vocabulary word.
Check out these books for more fun!
My First Spanish/English Visual Dictionary by Jean-Claude Corbeil
The Usborne Not-Your-Everyday-Illustrated Thesaurus by James Maclaine
Big Picture Thesaurus by Rosie Hore
Thesaurus Rex by Laya Steinburg