Thursday, May 24, 2012

School Stuff

We've been sounding out a lot of words in school lately, but the curriculum we use started to introduce the word "the" in with a few simple three letter words.  Of course this is a challenging concept for a kid who has been trying to hard to use those letter sounds to read words.  So a couple weeks ago I was sitting there and an idea popped into my head, and a poster was born.  I hadn't hung anything up on our walls yet.  I put all of his school work for the week on the side of the refrigerator, along with our calendar and hundred chart but haven't really put any permanent visual aids up so far.  I'm pretty excited about our first transformation of kitchen to classroom though.  I tried to explain that with certain words the letters actually don't help us out all that much and we need to just memorize them.  There are words that we see written all the time that we have to have in our mind and just know them without getting very many clues from the words themselves.  So we made this poster of some words we just have to know.  Hopefully this little visual will help him master these seemingly simple words that can actually be pretty tricky for a beginning reader.  He's still working on trying not to sound them out.  We're starting to refer to our poster during school and throughout the day, and maybe seeing the words over and over throughout the day will help trigger that memory so he can be on his way to becoming an independent reader.

Friday, May 4, 2012

My Crazy Kid

So I was thinking this morning as I got my littlest guy out of bed after he was calling "Mama, maaaaammmmaaaa!" (He can actually get out on his own, but always calls for someone to get him.  Both my boys did at this age.)  But moving on to what I was actually thinking about this morning...

Lately my youngest has been repeating the last sound of some of his words several times in a row.  Mostly words that end with "s" or "t".  For instance:

light becomes light-t-t-t

cars becomes cars-s-s-s

This is on my mind this morning because I was changing his diaper and said, "Your diaper is really wet today."  He replied "Ah, (that's what he says for yes, even though he can say yes if you tell him too, weird) mama wet-t-t-t."

My baby is growing up and talking so much, even if he does repeat a sound or two at the end of a word :)

He is also completely obsessed with Cabelas right now.  That goes for both my boys at actually.  He calls it the "fish store", a term he got from big brother.  Last night he kept saying, "Mom, fish store." and then going to the front door.  At dinner he repeated it over and over again.  "Fish store.  Fish store.  Fish store."  And then looking back and forth from mom to dad hoping someone would get the hint.  Anyone who knows my son knows he's very one track minded.  If he gets an idea in his head he keeps saying it over and over and over again.  If you're reading a book and he really likes the giraffe he will just say giraffe over and over again until he feels it's been properly acknowledged.

As I look at him right now exploring the room while I type I can't help but think how much I love this kid!

(FYI this has actually taken me a lot longer than it should have because his explorations resulted in me having to jump up and get him out of some potentially messy situations...several times)