Advent adventures: day 12

Today we opened the twelfth drawer of our tabletop advent tree. Inside, my children found a tiny trinket to hang on one of its branches and a strip of paper upon which was written a fun and festive activity. There's one of these for every day of Advent - I know that for sure because I came up with the twenty-four ideas, lovingly wrote them out and carefully placed one in each of the tree's diminutive drawers. I'm going to attempt to take a photograph to represent each day's little Advent adventure and post them all here.

Day 12: Invent a Christmas game

[Buddy's wonderful Reindeer Race dice game: return Santa's hat to the North Pole avoiding avalanches and polar bear attacks along the way]

[Daisy's hilarious Pin-the-hat-on-Santa game - just add a blindfold]

A winning formula for reading

Buddy is still pale, lack-lustre and sofa-bound. I'm thankful he's got the attention span for a feature film or two, and that he's old enough to enjoy a board game without tears, or too much of me fixing the outcome in his favour.

In particular we've been enjoying playing Grand Prix, pictured above, which Buddy got for his last birthday. I remember he wasn't particularly keen on learning to read at the time, but this dice game tapped into his obsession with all things Formula One. And brilliantly, it kick-started his desire to try reading non-book text independently. It's a lovely twist on classic snakes and ladder game-play with hazards like oil leak, miss a turn and engine full out, move to 57.

I remember being so encouraged by this that I made him his very own Formula One Bingo game, pictured below.

I used a mixture of high frequency words, phonetic spellings and specialist racing terminology to get him practising a range of reading strategies within a fun bingo game context; you have to complete the chequered flag to win!

Playing these games with Buddy again after a few months, even with him feeling unwell, I can see how his reading skills have come on in leaps and bounds. He is now an enthusiastic reader of everything, everywhere, and so I'll always be pleased we found a winning formula with Formula One.