Reading and Writing, and 'Rithmetic

Emmie is sooo into writing right now. She writes ALL.THE.TIME. and I love it! She loves learning about letters (much credit goes to "letter land" at school!) and loves to learn to spell people's names. She knows how to spell her name, Ellie, and Ruthie and knows at least parts of most of her friends' names. She also loves the kids bulletin at church when you have to replace a symbol with a number using a decoder.
I haven't really pushed her in learning. We've never done preschool at home or anything like that. I teach her when the opportunity arises and she wants to learn. I don't always have a lot of patience and she and I don't always work well together. I want learning to be a fun, positive experience for her so if one of us has hit our breaking point we stop. However, during the times when she is really interested in learning I try and find ways to encourage it. For instance, for awhile she was really interested in clocks and the clock in our kitchen has roman numerals so I wrote the numbers over the roman numerals in dry erase marker so she has learned the basics of reading a clock.
The other day we wrote a letter to Uncle Ben to work on her writing. She had so much fun! She got a little frustrated when she had to do "w"s but we pushed through and she was so proud of her letter.


A few days ago Emmie was really frustrated because she couldn't get her "W" right. (When you've done "M"s over, and over, and over it's hard to do the reverse!) I reminded her of how hard "M"s used to be and how easy they were for her now. She thought about it for a minute and then got a big grin on her face..she remembered and was really proud of her accomplishments. Some days are easy "W" days and some are hard but that's ok...she's now much more confident that it WILL get easier.


Reading. I am so looking forward to Emmie being able to read...I know she will love it. She however is really not too interested. I have noticed however that she is gradually picking up words. I have the hooked on phonics app on my ipad and we work on it sometimes. She can often recognize the "at" words but really still doesn't grasp the whole concept of letters making words. I know that one day the light is going to go on and she's going to want to read EVERYTHING.
The other day she was working on our felt calendar and she picked October for the month. She couldn't remember the name "October" but recognized it from their calendar at school. She then wanted to know where "October" went on the calendar. She couldn't decided between the spot that said "day" and the spot that said "month". I told her it went in the month spot. She looked at the calendar and then picked the right spot. I asked her why she picked that spot and she said because it has an "m". YES! I was so proud of her. We work a lot on phonics when she's writing (how do you spell tree...well what does it start with "ta-ta"...T!) and it's nice to see it carry over to reading.
She also pulled out her little notebook and started copying all the words off of the calendar. It was so funny and she was so serious about her project!







I had to include the video of Ellie singing. She is really into singing right now and the BIBLE is one of her favorites. She likes to sing it often and with GUSTO (which makes me smile)! Unfortunately she seems to have gotten her musical abilities from her Grandaddy. :)