Weekly Reports 2008:8&9

Mathematics
The kids have begun the lessons on comparative size in Singapore Earlybird Mathematics 2a (Anna joins Joshua in some of them, doing the preparation activities but not the writing). After Joshua took two weeks on lesson 5, Joshua and Anna whizzed through lesson 6 and the first page of lesson 8 in one day. They really liked using words such as big, small, tall, short, middle-sized, just right to describe the size of objects and people. It has been a break from numerals and I think Joshua in particular will enjoy the measurement lessons coming up.
This morning at church Anna picked up the hymn book and quietly :) read the numbers for the verses of several hymns, pointing at each numeral with her finger as she did so. None of the hymns had more than 5 verses, but it was great to see how keen she is to practice her new skill of recognising numerals.

Penmanship
Joshua has been tracing thank you letters for his birthday presents all this week and will be completing them next week. Some examples:Joshua dictated each of these letters for me last weekend and I transcribed them onto our writing paper so he could trace one or two letters each day. (His own name was the only word he wrote without an exemplar.) When we read L's letter he insisted that I include "very" in the second sentence. It was amazing how little Joshua complained about his penmanship tasks this week, even though some of his letters were quite long, because it was his own words he was writing and there was a clear and important purpose. On the other hand, it probably also helped that I gave him his penmanship tasks immediately before Play School and he knew he would miss some TV time if he dilly-dallied and complained. 2:45pm is definitely a much better time-slot for penmanship than immediately after Circle Time.

Reading
Thanks to a kind loan from my good friend Mrs B***, Joshua and Anna have been practicing their reading with the Bob Books (which Joshua always explains are "not Bob the Builder, just Bob" books). Joshua has now read the first 9 books in the red box and Anna has just read book 5 in thie same set. It might seem from this that Anna is close in ability to Joshua but there is a noticeable difference in their blending abilities. Joshua is getting more and more confident with blending and is beginning to read familiar words without sounding them out. Unfamiliar words, especially the names, still give him difficulty because he is trying to blend the sounds to form a word which is already known to him. Anna is very much still at the sound it out then say the sounds slowly and blend them together with Mummy's help stage. I have noticed that she doesn't pronounce the correctly, she says "vee" or "veh", and we've been doing a lot of practice on tongue placement for this word. (We've made up a sing-song chant: "I love the Lord, I love the Lord Jesus, I love the Lord Jesus Christ.") She seems to read that and this correctly, so I am not sure why she struggles with the.

Literature
We've read through The Complete Adventures of Curious George in the last fortnight just before Anna's naptime each day and Joshua and Anna have thoroughly enjoyed it. Tonight at bedtime, Anna explained to me that when she was hanging from the washing line this afternoon she was just "pretending to be a monkey, a curious monkey like Curious George, with an imaginary tail." Again, I have only myself to blame for my children's misdemeanors, it seems. I'm not giving up the books, though. Never gonna give up the books!