Z has been filling in pages in the fantastic Dr. Seuss/Roy McKie collaboration My Book About Me, a "tell us about yourself" fill-in-the-blank book for kids, without anyone's help or guidance. She then enjoys comparing her entries with her mother's, as Jenni also filled in the blanks in the same book around thirty years ago. If you didn't have this privilege, let your child start a new family tradition of fork- and door-counting and random self-reflection. This book is good enough that it will still be available thirty years from now, so their kids can create a memory book from their own perspective as well.

You can buy My Book About Me on Amazon for about $9 in hardcover.

The entry above cracks us up. In case you can't read it, here's a closeup of one of the many gems you'll find when your child answers a bunch of survey questions with the utmost sincerity.

ThinkFun's What's Gnu, a three-letter-word spelling game for kids ages 5-8, is way better than you are thinking. It combines a great tile dispenser with the challenge of generating possible three-letter words by claiming letters that are passing through the game in rapid succession to add to word cards that have one letter already fixed in the first, second, or third position. The game is designed for up to six players, meaning access to letters can be pretty competitive, but there are a lot to go around.

Games like this help kids make sense of spelling in an opportunistic and creative way that is a nice reversal of the word identification most reading practice entails. They also foster a sense of overall success at reading as everyone ends up with something to show for their efforts, even if they aren't the winner. Creative parents can design any number of handicaps to allow older and younger readers to play together - older selects letters only after the younger has had their pick, or giving an older child several extra cards to fill to meet her quota.

Here's a demo of how the device at the center of this game works. In this case it's used for a far less successful game, Zingo, a Bingo spin-off that can only really justify its existence by the presence of the gadget. In the case of What's Gnu, though, it uses it in a constructive way that makes the gadget feel central to the game's design.


What's Gnu? and Zingo retail for $20 and are on sale now for $12-15 on Amazon.com. In fact, the whole range of ThinkFun kids' games appear to be on sale for 25-30% off.

The alphabet, in truck form. Parisian artist Eric Tabuchi spent four years on this. Now, should you be willing to spend EU25 on a coffee table book for your little truckmaster to lavish his or her attention on, it can be yours. He sells sets of prints that spell words, too.

[Via DaddyTypes]