Literacy Milestone: Doing Crossword Puzzles

Sometimes when I am watching a movie (especially a movie that I've seen before) I have trouble staying awake. I've taken to keeping a book of relatively easy crossword puzzles handy to work on while I'm watching. If the puzzles are easy they don't take up too much of my attention, but they keep me busy enough to keep me awake. 

Recently my daughter noticed what I was doing, and declared that she wanted to participate. She started by filling in a couple of words, after I told her what the answers would be, but she did progress to reading clues, and to guessing a couple of the answers. She ended up filling in the upper left-hand corner of a puzzle, and was quite excited to show off her accomplishment to my husband. 

She's not quite ready to do crossword puzzles on her own (her sight word knowledge is still fairly limited), but I'm happy to work on some with her if she enjoys it. And because I am a person who never passes up the opportunity to buy a book, I ordered a crossword puzzle book aimed at kids. She was thrilled when it arrived, and was nearly late for school the next day because she wanted to work on her first puzzle. I'm finding that crossword puzzles help build her skills in spelling, vocabulary, and general knowledge, all in a fun way. 

I do have an app for crossword puzzles on my iPad but I don't like sending my daughter the message that I'm on the iPad during family movie night, so I use an old magazine-style book that I've had for years. Using a print crossword puzzle book also offers fewer distractions, and is fairly portable. My daughter wanted to take her new book on her school field trip, which involved a train ride. [Which I did not agree to, but I appreciated the intent.]

Sometimes the classics are still the right thing. Have you tried crossword puzzles with your kids? 

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