Games I Play with my Sister

This will seem random and unrelated to books, but hang in there.


I was a pivotal part in my little sister's education. It's not as if I raised her, by any means, but I helped.

I didn't teach her the alphabet, but I taught her the song.
I didn't teach her how to read, but I created a space in the corner of our room and read with her for hours.


I didn't make my sister the brilliant whiz kid she is today--I certainly had NOTHING to do with her science, math, or history smarts. But I think it doesn't hurt that we had and have games we love to play.



When she was little and we had dial up, we got a loading page often and for long bits of time. So to pass that time we sang a song: L-O-A-D-I-N-G, dot Dot DOT.  We sang it over and over and over, and that is why the first word my sister knew how to spell was 'loading'.


When she got a little older, we'd go to movies. My favorite game to play at the movies is "Say the first word you see during each preview."  with my sister, my mother, and I all in different positions, together we usually got the gist of each advertisement.


She's even OLDER now, and so am I. I just turned 18, so I go out many times a week to work or school and when I come home I have all sorts of receipts and bus passes and packets of buffalo sauce in my pockets. Occasionally when I get home, she'll be on the computer and I'll play "What the hell is in my pockets?"


But I'm kidding. My favorite game to play is "Where should this novel have started?" Sometimes we come across a book that's slow or really hard to drag ourselves through. I don't like leaving a book unread, so I challenge her by saying "Keep going through the book until you find the spot where it should have started."

Sometimes it's a paragraph or a chapter after the real beginning, and we're good. Sometimes (mostly with self published authors) it's closer to the middle of the book that we find the "Real First Sentence".



What word/book/reading games do you play?