by Big Daddy on January 3, 2010
My six year old son saw a word search puzzle on the back of my new calendar for 2010. He saw the “easy” words right away (the ones that read from right to left), then started asking questions about the “backwards” words that I had already circled.
One thing led to another and he soon wanted to try his own word search puzzle. So I headed over to my favorite search engine and found a really neat site that has lots of downloadable and printable worksheets for school age children — including word search puzzles.
The site is nicely organized; you can browse for materials by age / school grade or use the “Search” box on the page to look for a specific item (as I did with the word search puzzle). Although I didn’t explore it, there are also links to other sites that offer similar resources. To me, this is a sign that this site is a “labor of love”; after all, most for-profit businesses don’t link to the competition…
Regardless of the motive, it does cost money to host a website and make materials like this available. While you can download everything for free, there is a link you can click to make a small donation, and if you find this site to be useful, let me gently encourage you to donate a few dollars, as I did.
The only “down” side, if you can even call it that, is that the site’s style looks to be a bit dated. But don’t let that fool you; the content is there and it’s pretty easy to find what you want. And even if it is a bit older-looking, the layout is clean and it’s easy to figure out where you want to go.
Overall, this old dad thinks it’s a great site — and thought enough of it to send a few dollars their way. You, too, may want to check it out.
Thanks for a nice site and a great resource, TLSBooks!
by Big Daddy on June 27, 2009
We purchased a bicycle for my now six year old son a couple of years ago. To be honest, he hadn’t shown much interest in it until recently. All of his friends used scooters to get around, and our son got quite good at getting to where he wanted to go via scooter.
Recently Mom decided to press the issue a bit. I got out his bike, gave it the once-over and pronounced it as being street ready, and he got started with it. And all was fine until…
The day I first took off the training wheels. He refused to ride the thing. But did I put them back on? Absolutely not!
Instead, I took off the pedals and lowered the seat a bit, which allowed him to push himself with his feet. Lots of small children do that here in Germany; in fact, his little sister has just such a bike (it has no pedals and no chain).
So he rode around on that for a few days, then started pushing himself faster and faster, then started picking his feet up as he was coasting…
Which was the answer we were looking for. This experience taught him how to balance himself without the pedals. So when I put the pedals back on today, he took right off and rode the thing like he had been doing it for months.
Of course, we now need to teach him to ride safely (but thankfully he’s a good boy and the lines of communication are open).
There was one minor glitch, however. At first, when I put the pedals back on (it was actually his idea; he asked me to put them back on), he was having trouble and was getting a bit frustrated. But just as soon as I told him that it was a “practice session” and that it was OK if he didn’t get the hang of it today, he immediately relaxed and took off pedaling.
The lesson? If there is one, pressure probably isn’t a good way to get small children to learn and perform.
If this post helped you teach your child how to ride their bike (or if it helped you in any other way), please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you!
