Words

These learning games use everyday household items and can be fun for you and your child to do together during the summer months.Vocabulary: Using dry lima beans, write a word to be reviewed on each with a fine-tipped marker. Place five to 10 beans into a small can. Let your child shake out the beans and read each word, then use it in a sentence.Comprehension: Write a sentence on a strip of paper. Then cut the sentence apart into individual words and place them in a lunch bag. Have your child empty the bag and put the sentence together.

ACTIVITYChildren enjoy the playful language contained in rhymes. Rhyming introduces children to the sounds of words and improves their sensitivity to the phonemes that make up our language. Through rhymes children learn that language not only has meaning, but it also has form. A Web source that allows children to complete rhymes and to submit some of their own is www.abctooncenter.com/rhymes.htm.Did You Ever See?:Silliness is the name of the game with this fun activity. Read a variety of funny rhymes and poems by Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky.

Editor's note: Today, reading specialist Susan Rapp discusses the benefits of electronic toys and provides guidelines for selecting them. On Wednesday's Parent & Child page, she will review specific toys appropriate for emerging readers.Somewhere between the phonics workbooks and the high-tech CD-ROM games are new products that can motivate and entertain while providing serious learning of reading skills. These include electronic toys, which are more portable than personal computer games and more interesting than paper and pencil tasks.

Flora Cejku, 8, knew she was going to win beforehand. She even told her Police Athletic League officer, Eugene Cabral, so.On the other hand, Victoria Stepney-Smith, 10, was shaking with nerves going in. As runner-up in the Mora Crossman PAL center spelling contest, Flora was only told the day before that she would compete in the city's third annual PAL spelling bee, held Friday night on the Walbrook High School auditorium stage.In the end, both came out on top, sharing the winner's stand in their respective age groups.

Imagin reading this sentense as its being typed -- befor someone has a chance to look it ovr and corect the grammer and mispellings.Look familiar somehow? If so, you've probably been watching television with closed captioning, the word-by-word display of what is being said on screen. In programming that features it, typos seem to turn up more often than commercials."Theorys" instead of "theories." The errant "e" in "includeing." Or the word "mayor" used to describe a female horse.Captioning has bloomed since 1993, when all new televisions 13 inches or larger were required to have a built-in closed-caption decoder.

IT IS WITH GREAT verisimilitude that we present another installation of "Ask Mister Language Person," the column that answers your common questions about grammar, punctuation and unwanted body hair. This is the only language column to receive the coveted Lifetime Bathroom Pass from the American Society of University Professors Who Are Never in Their Offices.We will commence the onset of today's column by beginning with our first question, which concerns a basic rule of business grammar:Q.

They still have to stand on their tiptoes to peer through the windows in the door to Room 8, and some still aren't strong enough to turn the doorknob without using both hands. But inside their first-grade classroom at Reisterstown's Cedarmere Elementary School, much has changed.No longer is there confusion between p's and q's, between b's and d's. The letters scattered across walls and blackboards have meaning. Books are looked at for the words, not just the pictures.More than halfway through first grade, reading is no longer much of a guessing game in Room 8. It's an accomplishment for almost all of the 22 first-graders -- and a continuing challenge.

WASHINGTON -- Seeing the floor littered with stompies, the drissy wowser told the janitor to stop kicksin' and clean up before the bagmen arrive for the toenadering.Huh?What sounds like gibberish is actually foreign English -- words used by folks in other countries who share the language with Americans, but with their own linguistic twists."Stompies" are cigarette butts in South Africa. New Zealanders use "drissy" as adjective meaning "frantic." A "wowser" is an Aussie with a puritanical disposition.

What's in a simple word? Only simple misunderstanding, stupidity, insensitivity or simple ruin.David Howard, an aide to Washington Mayor Anthony Williams, resigned this week after using the word "niggardly" to mean what it means: stingy, miserly. Some people were offended, as the word sounds very similar to a racial slur.Williams accepted the resignation, saying his aide showed poor judgment; an investigation is under way. Howard said he used the word to describe a fund he administers."Niggardly" generally tends to be avoided in speech and in writing.

FOR those who prefer that fund-raising letters get straight to the point, the opening sentence of a solicitation from MADAY may seem to be, at best, a message badly garbled in transmission: "Truly the hore wene he was compeld to develop a comppozision sremde the lo and grimist of the hole week."But for MADAY, the especially apt acronym for Maryland Associates for Dyslexic Adults and Youths Inc., the message could not be more clear. Those garbled words are a cry for help from an adult dyslexic who knows the words he wants to use but has no clue how to encode them into print.

A lot of people didn't trust ATMs when they were first introduced, preferring to make their transactions with a live teller. While I did enjoy chatting with my teller from week to week, I must acknowledge that I did not relish waiting in line behind the person who was making the regional Girl Scout cookie sales deposit with a stack of singles and a shoe box filled with loose change. So in the interest of time, I forayed boldly into the new ATM technology more than three decades ago. And I discovered that I could, from the comfort of my vehicle, wait just as long or longer for banking service.

"... The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt Americans were scared, but they got it. In the midst of the Great Depression, struggling to feed their families, they kept hope alive with the help of FDR. Words well-delivered can be a tonic for despairing souls, something to remember at Thanksgiving. As we have seen again recently, words can stir us to rise above economic calamity or reinvigorate our democracy. And it's not simply about winning elections.

You can't blame Karen Fletcher for deciding not to fight. Had she lost, she faced the possibility of five years in prison. Under the plea agreement she accepted in early August, she got six months of house arrest, five years on probation and a $1,000 fine. But if the agreement allows Ms. Fletcher, of Donora, Pa., to avoid the more onerous punishment, it also allows us to avoid a violent collision between morality and the Constitution. Karen Fletcher is a pornographer. And not just any old pornographer: The 56-year-old woman specializes in the rape, torture and murder of children.

For being "just words," they're sure stirring up some controversy. Critics of Sen. Barack Obama are pointing to the similarity between one of the Democratic presidential hopeful's signature speeches and an address that Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick gave in 2006. Although Patrick, who is close with Obama and shares his heavyweight political adviser, says he gave his friend permission to borrow his lines, that isn't stopping accusations of plagiarism. Last weekend in Wisconsin, responding to statements from rival Sen. Hillary Clinton that she offers solutions while Obama merely "makes speeches," Obama told a stirred-up crowd, "Don't tell me words don't matter."

Bitch is an appropriate word when referring to a female dog. Yet how many of us would use the term when chatting about a pet's gender with a stranger in the park? Few, I'd venture to say - because of our sensitivity to the word's negative connotations. Then there's the word love. Two strangers meet at a singles bar and one asks the other to return home with him to "make love." That's love as a euphemism for sex. How different the meaning is when a couple of a quarter-century's duration stay home on a Saturday night to talk, snuggle and make love.

Good morning -- Milton Bradley -- Words can never hurt you? Apparently not.

In the eyes of the Constitution's framers, black people had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The words are from the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, written in 1857 by Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, a Marylander. Taney did not say he shared this view. But there is evidence in personal letters and legal writing that he did. He was, moreover, a leading member of the American Colonization Society, an organization committed to shipping free blacks back to Africa.

What's the point? -- One word, that's all you have to play with here. Not to mention you only have 60 seconds to write about it. The point is to remove all of the strain and complications that come with deep thought and analysis. Just release all of your inhibitions and write the first thoughts that cross your mind when you see the day's inspiration. What to look for --Have fun with your thoughts and words, that's all. And when you finish writing, compare your short composition with the those of other people who have shared their short-form writing.

We were promised political drama and dirty tricks when Joe "Prince of Darkness" Steffen swooped into Harford County. But so far, the only devious zip he's added to the County Council president's race is a lousy cartoon bubble. Mind you, it's a cartoon bubble rising from the lips of Gov. Robert Ehrlich, on a palm card for Aaron Kazi. "Vote KAZI for Council President," it reads, above a photo of the GOP hopeful and his wife. "He's Conservative, Principled, and Self Made." Why is that even vaguely naughty?

Kathleen Farrell has left a mark - thousands of them, in fact - on beaches she has never set foot on. Farrell, who lives in St. Petersburg, Fla., wasn't at the beach, but vacationing in the mountains of North Carolina in 1996 when inspiration struck: a newfangled way to spread not just "The Word," but three of them. Farrell, a clinical psychologist, sliced up an old inner tube, cut the pieces into letters, glued them backward on the soles of an old pair of sandals and then walked from wet grass onto wooden deck, leaving a trail of words behind her. The word "Jesus" was left by the right foot; the words "Loves You" by the left.