March 21, AO year 1, week 15

Did I accidentally post my post of the books I am currently reading? I see that one visitor saw it. I'm sorry. It was not to post! (You did get a sneak peek into what I'm reading!)  I *thought* a draft blog post was a good place to keep info like that. Maybe I need to get myself a book, like the one I made for Fina.

We are watching our black turtle bean plant that we sprouted a few weeks ago. We watered it and observed it this morning. There are two sets of trifoliate leaves now and a tiny new set just starting to sprout.

Today, Fina is learning how to read!!!

We are using Brandy Vencel's blog "Teaching Reading with Bob Books." We did series 1 book 1 today (1:1). Fina now can read "sam, sat, on, mat" etc. She is SO excited and can't wait to read Narnia by herself. So far, so good!

We used our magnetic letters on a cookie sheet to learn and manipulate the letters. Then we did all 4 lessons that go with that first book.

Yikes, the bottom of this cookie sheet is not in good shape!

On to do some math. We continued with the counting to 100. She did 6E.

And a little bit of cursive. We reviewed some letters and tried working a bit more on the letter "o."

We worked through her memory box (her Shakespeare passages are really coming along) and we read a few new poems from When We Were Very Young: "The Wrong House," "Summer Afternoon" and "The Dormouse and the Doctor."

Fina wanted me to write a story that she could read herself, so I wrote this and she read it to me. Incredible!

I read "The Master Maid" from The Blue Fairy Book. She was not really able to give me a narration of it. (She woke up at 4am this morning, and though she "rested" til 7, she didn't really sleep at all.)

We had a quick lunch. Fina has swollen tonsils, a viral infection, and can only eat mushy and liquid foods. So there have been a lot of smoothies, avocado and bananas around here.

After lunch, we spent all afternoon outside. We went to the park and Fina rode her bike and splashed through some puddles.

A kind mom, (fellow AOer who lives a few towns over from us, a Facebook friend whom we met in person for the first time today,) came over to deliver some books to me. She met us in the park.  We had a wonderful chat.  With her, we saw a white jackrabbit in our park, and listened to and tried to identify some birds. (Also our neighbourhood horses who were out for a walk). Fina made me proud. She was pretty into it (and her normal chatty-with-strangers self). It was a proud AO/CM moment for sure.

We went for a walk to the creek to see what was going on over there. There is still a lot of water in and around the creek. As we walked back through the museum, one of the maple sap gathering men saw us looking into the maple sap buckets and he came and let Fina take a drink from one of the buckets hanging from the maple tree. She was thrilled.

She stayed out and played with a couple of friends until supper time. She is exhausted!

She was very proud to tell all about learning how to read. "In five weeks, I'm going to be reading Narnia. And that big book about composers. And Fairy Realm."