Expecting Snow?

Connor just asked, "Mommy, am I old enough to play snowball fights?"

I said, sure. I'd like to see him try to form a snowball. Of course, the first hurdle to get over would be snow in Mississippi (I won't hold my breath for that).

Connor is Reading!

As a result of what he's learned at school (and not anything I taught him), Connor can now use letter sounds to sound out simple words. Last week I brought home a "phonics word-ending game" called Python Path, and he is having fun with it. At school they have only learned the short vowel sounds; I had to teach him about the "silent e," and he totally got it.

(My experiences teaching middle schoolers have conditioned me to not expect learning to occur so easily, so I am constantly surprised when Connor picks things up after only a single explanation. It's just short of miraculous to me.)

Helping a novice learn to read really drives home the inconsistencies in the English language. There's care and rare, but they don't rhyme with are ...

After he sounded out and read "rake" (using his new silent e skills), I told him he was reading. "But I can't read BOOKS yet," he replied.

Numbers

At school Connor is learning to write. Here he is practicing his numbers: he wrote the first line by himself, I wrote the second as a model, and he wrote the third.

New

Halloween 2009