Sneaking In Reading

Little Bit is in Kindergarten. Meaning.....school wasn't an option for her this year. When she was "in Pre-K", if she didn't feel like doing school, well, she didn't. I sent her to go play.

We're slowly working our way through her Handwriting Without Tears book. She's on lowercase letters now. We set aside our Math U See Primer sometime back in the fall and just now picked it up again. She's more ready for it now. We're still LOVING Five in a Row and it has transformed what was, to me, a failing Kindergarten year. She wasn't failing, mind you, but the year wasn't going like I wanted. Then FIAR came along and everything is better. And she still does a lot of stuff with her sister's work.

She also worked through books A, B, and C of Explode the Code. And LOVED THEM. Seriously. She got excited every single day that we brought them out. We finished those before Christmas and began book 1 in January. Eh, it's going OK, but she's still not exactly reading.

I'm not worried. Back in my day as a teacher, children were expected to start reading in 1st grade, NOT kindergarten. Even that is too early for some children. So it isn't that I expect her to be further along, it's just that I like to see progress.

I don't know where this idea came from, but it is GOLDEN! Each day, I write 2 sentences on the white board in our school room. They all follow the same pattern:

Little Bit, is the cat wet?
Little Bit, is the tent big?

OK, so we'll mix it up a bit later. Right now, is and the are sight words she is supposed to know (but really didn't) so I keep throwing those in. This morning there really was a wet cat outside and we really do have a new, big tent. After she reads the question, she answers it and then draws a picture about that question with the erasable markers.

How cool is that when you are little?

She's super motivated to read the sentence (especially since Sissy and I already know what it says!) and get to draw with the markers.

Well, that's my idea for the day. It's working for us right now.