Who says today’s youngsters need digital devices to be fully engaged in learning?
Contagious was the joy on the last school day in May when, with the aid of a totally not-smart white board and a plain, boring, old black dry marker, a library class of six year olds, reading frontwards and backwards, deduced what dad, mom, and sis, have in common.
Intensified was their joy when their kindergarten teacher joined them and they were able to repeat, albeit with some scaffolding and prompting, the fancy name entrusted to them for applying to such words (a name their teacher momentarily blanked on): palindromes!
Amazement turned to utter shared glee when three of the eighteen students realized that their first or last names were–you guessed it, as they did—palindromes!
In true marriage of the best of old and new technologies, the students implored their teacher to find more Internet examples, while they tried coming up with some of their own–more (“bib”) or less (“Mrs.”) successfully.
Regardless, they were having fun playing with words, stretching their imaginations and their sense of parallelism and spelling and feeling very grown-up playing with palindromes.
What’s your favorite palindrome to share with your children? There are many wonderful sites on the web to inspire you. (Please let me know if I can share links with you.) There are many wonderful, books, too. The one that got me started on loving palindromes was authored by Mark Shulman and is titled Mom and Dad Are Palindromes.
Happy palindroming!…Beware! It definitely can become habit forming.
cbhanek 