Operation Play Time - Book Marathon

Today's Operation Playtime task is the book marathon.

As you can guess as people who have a company selling educational items - we love reading and our two year old would spend every day 'reading' his Mr Men collection or Thomas collection and our four year old has just discovered the joys of the Oxford Reading Tree school reading scheme and "can really read real words now" as he told us yesterday.

Here's a favourite book and a 'reading' activity:

First Thousand Words - This first word book has friendly scenes to encourage the direct association of words with objects and reinforce known words. Each page has a scene with labelled objects to discuss - great for increasing expressive and receptive language. Also contains illustrations for body parts, occupations, actions, opposites, time, weather, colours, shapes and numbers.

We can spend hours on each page just talking about the picture, finding all the things listed and then linking it to our experiences, songs, other books - it's and endless resource.

Cinderella Puppet Set - This seven puppet story set comes with a detailed story card to help you tell the story of Cinderella and contains the main characters you would expect to find from this enchanting favourite story. Each character is a finger puppet has an open loop on the back to allow finger access either upwards or downwards, a particularly useful feature when using with a puppet theatre.

We love acting out stories with puppets - they really help children understand what is happening, remember the story and help them use their imagination.