Our Weekend

Raegan got a wooden "ghoul bus" kit from school that her and Daddy put together Friday evening. She gets to use a hammer sometimes at school and she did quite well with it for this project too.

 

 

As seen on my walk on Saturday afternoon. I just love fall so much!

 

 

A very early Sunday morning art project. Because Daylight Savings Time means nothing to a four year old.

 

 

Sunday afternoon trip to the library. I've been trying to get back in the habit of taking Raegan again weekly and our weekends have been slow enough lately that we've been managing. We've found some fantastic new books to read (including "The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog" and "Into the Castle") and Raegan gets to play with some different toys. She did this alphabetic order puzzle completely by herself. Which really doesn't surprise me, since she was able to do alphabetic order last year in preschool. But it's always nice to see the results of preschool, you know? :)

 

And while I'm talking about Raegan's learning, she's really starting to take off with reading and sounding out words. Yesterday while we were reading a book before supper, she sounded out and read "bed", "hug" and "bag", all of which were words that I had never had her try to sound out before. And she didn't even struggle - it was just a smooth sound out then she said the word. And last week she brought home a sheet where she had written numbers 11-19 and has shown us how she can count by 10s. Sometimes she just blows me away!

Raegan is reading!

Raegan has known all of the letter sounds for quite a few months now. She's been able to sound out three letter words, but hasn't been able to blend it into actual reading yet. On April 24th (recording this date for posterity!) we were reading a book and I was showing her how to sound out words in it. Afterwards, I wrote the word cat on a piece of paper and told her to sound it out. She sounded it out and blended it into a word. The look on her face was pure amazement. You could see it click with her - this is how you read. She had me write more words and tried to sound them out (she could do "it" but not a few others). Later when she was playing with her blocks she noticed they had words on them and started trying to sound them out too.

Currently we are working on the -at family, which she's pretty fluid at. She can also do "mom" which I threw in there to make Raegan actually have to read instead of just memorizing. Now we're starting on the -an family.

I love reading so much. I was such a reader when I was a child, and I'm so excited to see my daughter start on the same path.

Reading Mommy's Books

This is a daily occurance. Raegan will play for awhile after breakfast, then get out a bunch of her books and sit in the kitchen and tell stories while she flips through the pages. Over the last week or so, she's been getting out my books and sitting down and looking through them forever. Sometimes she'll point out letters in them, but most of the time she just tells stories about what she's reading.

After I finished taking this video and she finished flipping through the book, she said, "I'm not going to read it backwards anymore Mommy." Smart girl! :)