When you want to work on a letter sound with young children, you don't need full alliteration, you just need lots of words that begin with a certain sound. Suppose you start with D. Any kid can be prompted to come up with Dog, or Daddy. Most can follow clues to dragon, or dream. If you read Dr Seuss you of course go with Donald David Doo dreamed a dozen doughnuts and a duck dog too.

House rules will differ for each house, but in ours, whoever comes up with a word last wins. So saying half a dozen in a row to use up words is common. We also have very lax rules for the kids; they can repeat any word, while Mom and Dad must use new words. Oh and using any outside help, like google is cause for disqualification. Other than that, we just aim to have a fun discourse full of the letter of the day.

After an hour or so we have used up dreary, darning, disco, dwarf and all the compound words like doormat, doorknob, or daytime, daylight, and daylong. So we move on to bigger words like destroyer, destiny, declare, and deviate, or derivative.

Somewhere around lunch time we get desperate and decide to try all the places we know, like Denver, Dorchester and Dormont.

Then we start to borrow foreign words, like derriere, or dormir , dos , and deux.

By dinner time we start to get desperate and decide all words have various forms, so dine, dined, dinner, dining, dines, and diner all count as new words. Back to that French, conjugation is now fun. Je Dor, Tu dors, il/elle dort, nous dormons, vous dormez, ils/elles dormant. (And that is just for present tense, which is all I know)

By the time we head to children’s choir practice the other adults want to know we are fighting over who can conjugate the Latin Deo first, which essentially means remembering all the different forms sung in any song we heard, because neither of us knows Latin very well. (Dona, Donno? Domine, dues?)

If this is all done with the giggles and excitement of a couple parents competing for fun, kids will learn something. From how to compete (don’t get all worked up, it is for fun!) To how to graciously lose, kids are learning. Not to mention since you repeat the sound “d” so many times and “D is for desist!” at every word any young child has to pick up some letter sounds.

Now I decidedly must decamp,and deliberate some other kind of delectable drivel to delight the dedicated readers of my decidedly disaster of a drawn out note.