We played games with magnetic refrigerator letters - we had lots of sets, so running out of the letters we wanted wasn't an issue. We started with word families and letter-sound correspondences, and played around with single words, mostly, although it was also great for introducing the concept of compound words, since it was easy to just slide them together to make a word, and then slide them apart to make two again. Later in the process we would leave messages for each other on the refrigerator many times a day. The key to making this tons of fun for my son was the fact the we would take turns arranging the letters, so he got to make up words for me to pronounce. His favorite thing was to put together long strings of consonants with very few vowels and listen to me try to hum and snort and spit my way through them. ( I always made my performance as ridiculous as possible...) Your son, like mine, might be really interested in the different permutations you can create from a single simple base by changing the initial letter only, or the middle letter(s) only, or the final letter only.

If you child is interested in and confused by word boundaries, make sure that you are speaking and reading slowly enough to make an audible break between words and are following under the text with your finger when you read with him, so he can see how the words have spaces between on the page and in speech. Not being able to distinguish the boundaries between words in speech and text makes me think about consulting with an audiologist and a speech-language pathologist, just to be sure that there aren't any subtle issues with hearing or language processing going on - I say that from the "better-safe-than-sorry" perspective of someone who wishes that she had not listened to people who told me that the seemingly minor issues I saw in my son (who was later diagnosed with multiple deficits, in addition to profound intellectual strengths) were probably nothing to worry about.

ETA: If you do TV, "Between the Lions" is awesome...

Last edited by aculady; 01/28/12 04:05 PM.