Awesome!

We had such a great day in school today. Right now the girls are outside (yea Spring!), and I am able to have a few moments to rest and get ready for the rest of the day.

We learned about using a balance in math today. The girls had a lot of fun putting different things on it to see which one was heavier or lighter. I had some containers with different things in them made up so that they couldn't see what was inside. We had fun trying to guess what they were and which ones would be the heaviest.

I am so excited for Kirsten today, too. She started blending sounds together!!!! YEA! I was excited yesterday when she started putting two sounds together, but today she was reading CVC words! That's consonant-vowel-consonant words. Yesterday we began "squishing" sounds together like a and t, a and n, or a and d. She hasn't fully got the hang of it yet, but as we went along, and started adding the third sound, like p-a-t, she started blending them all together. I started asking her what it was that she read, like when she read "hat", I asked her what we do with that. She told me we put them on our heads. That way, I knew that she had a picture of a hat in her head, and wasn't just repeating sounds. Once she started putting them together without a lot of help from me, the neighbors could have probably heard me cheering. Brianna actually told me that she didn't think I liked her as much as Kirsten anymore because of all the yeas and hurrays. Yea, that took a few minutes of explaining.

Brianna is reading things like "quests" and "depths" and "strength", as well as silent-e words. I forget sometimes to cheer her on, too, so I am glad she brought that to my attention. I do need to "yea!" her, too, more than I do. Tomorrow, she begins studying common spellings for the long A sound. I have to say, I am loving this phonics review for myself as well. I am hoping that I will become a better speller going through it with her. The book points out things that I have either forgotten or was never tought in the first place about why letter combinations say the the sounds that they do. Did you know that the English language has something like 74 sounds, but only 26 letters to represent them? It's no wonder it is so hard to learn to spell it. There are at least six different ways to make the long a sound alone! How do you decide which one it is???? LOL!

We will be wrapping up our study of frogs tomorrow with Frog and Toad are Friends. I loved that book when I was little, and I love that I am going to be able to share it with them. We have actually read it before, but it has been a while, so I don't know if Brianna will remember it or not. Probably, though. She has the memory of the young. Steal trap. Today, we made frogs from clay and discussed if we could make real frogs or not. Can you make a real live frog? No? Who can make a real live frog? "God!" I get with a HUGE smile on the face. It's just awesome.