Saturday mornings are full of fun-loving cartoons that help kids learn to read and count. Thank goodness for big bird and all his gang.

Good old Blues Clues helps kids to learn thought and process. How to understand and identify the clue and find the answer.

Dora the Explorer takes us on adventures with her back pack full of things we need like a map, compus or other items to help us find and locate where we need to go. It also introduces little ones to a new language Spanish.

Those are a few of our favorites. Yeah we love Sponge Bob too. To me he is of little use and makes me adore Barney The Big Purple Dinosaur. At least Barney sings and teaches kids.

Around our house and on car trips, we taught our kids to spell small words by singing a song. Very simple and kind fun. Take any tune that works and sing it" "C A T spells Cat," so on and so forth.

Make up or buy some flash cards. The sooner your child knows his upper and lower case A, B, Cs, the sooner they are off and running into the world of reading.

When you do story time, ask they if they recognize words that you have taught them. Pick up things around the house and teach them about them and how to spell them.

My youngest daughter has Dyslexia. She tried her hardest to not let anyone know she had a problem. She tried to memorize everything. But she made little mistakes like writing her numbers backwards. She had trouble with any word that had "th" in it.

The teacher didn't catch on for almost a year. But her dad and I noticed it on a lot of her papers and her stories at home. She was in kindergarten and would make up her own story book. We would giggle and help her spell the words to what she wanted the pictures to say.

At 18 months, she was playing games on the computer and building up off paper and creating buildings off her drawings. Before long she was cutting paper and making dogs and cats with whiskers and tails.

So it did not shock us at all that she was teaching herself how to work around dyslexia. She has to be tested to see how it is affecting her but she makes us believe it is a mild case by how she handles it and accepts it.

I know parents who never have read a book to their children and their children are fine readers. I know parents who have read books daily to their children and their kids hate reading. So try and make up games and make it fun to learn to read. Reading should never feel like a chore to a child.

Use what ever you have at hand to make it fun. We play tic, tac, toe with letters sometimes I will be A and my daughter is B and sometimes we skip out to P or Z. Either way, they learn to know the letter and how to write it. All in a game of tic, tac, toe.

Anyone else have creative ideas on how to make learning fun for our little ones? Speak up and share with us your cool ideas.