A guy walks into a bar . . .

Lately it has been like Evening at the Improv around here. The kids are fascinated with jokes. They can't get enough. I don't remember how it started, but it didn't take long before we were searching online for jokes, checking out joke books from the library, and trying to come up with our own jokes.

Katie has actually come up with a few "real" jokes. I should have written them down, because it seems I have already forgotten them. Bad Mama.

Tonight Tom came up with one. He has a toy that is a car that fits inside a train. The cars wheels serve as wheels for the train as well. Anyway, his joke was "Knock! Knock! Who's there? Truck! Truck who? That truck has TRAINING wheels!" Ok, so he doesn't quite understand the Knock! Knock! format, but he did get the play on words.

Besides being a lot of fun, it is amazing how much "learning" mileage we've gotten out of this joke obsession. They have picked up lots of new words and expressions. They are willing to let something unfamiliar go by when we are reading a story, but NOT in a joke. They've been rhyming. A surprising number of kid-friendly jokes are based on rhyming words. They are understanding in a deeper way that words often have multiple meanings. And perhaps most importantly, they are practicing playing around with language. They are paying attention to words and looking for different ways to put them together to find the humor.

Like the owl says, "It's a real hoot!"