113 words!

 She made it!! Today we checked which 2nd grade Dolch words Willow knows and we busted the chart. She's up to 113! And I still swear she learned all of these words by listening to us read and beginning to read on her own this summer. So strange!! Looks like we'll be headed to the book store for her to pick out a book!

Meanwhile, Owen is trying to teach Alli how to read while she hides under the computer desk:

Willow reading

Willow's desire for learning time during quiet time has waned a bit. We brought books and activities to do in PA and CO and she did ok. I've been trying to follow her interests and have dropped activities when she seems frustrated or disinterested. We haven't written in her journal in a loooooong time. We dropped sight word practice when she was seeming frustrated, as well as adding. She's never excited about anything related to spelling or decoding. I checked the remaining Dolch words with her after we got back from CO and she's up to 93 now. (I still swear that she learned all these words through watching the words as we read books. We never practiced them with her!!) I'll have to bring home the 2nd grade Dolch words to help us get to 100 before school starts. She's always been excited about the new book that I bring in for her to read but unfortunately I ran out of my intervention books at her level. I pulled some out of my books from being in the classroom but she quickly noticed the difference and would get frustrated easily. Maybe the levels don't jive as much as I'd thought. When reading, she relies heavily on her sight word knowledge. Since she knows a lot of sight words she's been able to read Level F books well. We had a conversation about rereading to self-correct after she got frustrated with me redirecting her after she read a word wrong, which completely didn't make sense in the sentence, and she's done a lot better at self-correcting on her own since then. The poor girl's going to wish she didn't have a Reading Specialist for a mom!! Her decoding skills are not the greatest so when she misread "strong" and "crawl" in a book today, she didn't have any strategies to figure them out. Meanwhile I'm trying to balance whether I teach her what she needs to know for the level she's on, or let the poor girl be a 5-year old and have her teachers teach her what's developmentally appropriate. Regardless, here's a video of her reading Little Wolf's New Home (Level F). It was her new book yesterday, then she reread it today for the video.

She did ask to keep the SmartPal and marker when I left her room after learning time the other day. I later noticed that she'd written this and she told me it said, "Hook is mean so don't stay near him and Smee."

Summer Learning

 Willow and I have been having "learning time" this summer during her quiet time. I hoped to get her to work with me for about 30 minutes but we've usually spent 45-60 minutes together since she's been so interested! When I leave she always asks to keep a few of the activities to keep playing with! I'm so glad that she's been open to me teaching her! I spend 40 hours of my week during the school year teaching struggling readers, yet I feel that my own daughter has taught herself to read by listening to us read....if that's possible?? I remember her pointing to words she saw in books as we read ("God" or "you" or finding a character's name) but I feel like she's just gained more and more sight words by trying to follow along with us as we read aloud to her. I did the 1st grade PALS screening with her in February and in May just to get a better picture of where she was, and was blown away both times by how many sight words she knew and how well she did with the little books. During our learning time we're filling in a hundreds chart with the number of sight words she knows. When we get to 100 she'll get to pick out a book from the store. We filled up the first 78 with words she already knew from the Preprimer, Primer, and First grade Dolch lists. She'll have to work for those last 22 though! She's also been reading 2 books a day - levels B, C, and D. She's done really well and seems to really enjoy it. She picked that as the 2nd activity we did today (usually she picks all the math activities first).

We've done some games finding rhyming pictures too. Nana got her a journal for her to draw and write it. She's been more hesitant about writing on her own and doesn't want to make mistakes or attempt any words that she doesn't already know how to spell, so thus far I've been writing what she dictates (still fun!).

We'd just been to the pond with Aunt Kim and read a book called "At the Pond" when she decided to draw this one. She was so excited that we filled up the whole page with words =)

We have a couple Kindergarten workbooks that I have her do a page out of each time for math. She's already improved on forming her numbers and has done well with adding. We use number tiles to create and read two-digit numbers, or add the number that comes next in a pattern. She filled in this hundreds chart on her own after I left one day:

Owen is learning some too! He sorted some buttons by color while Willow represented each number with buttons. So fun!!

Summer Days

We're enjoying these summer days!!! We're keeping the kids AND grandparents worn out!!

Check out the chase action here. 

Willow drove by this park at least two times a day, 6 days a week (to-and-from preschool and to-and-from church). There are at least 4 soccer fields and often in the evenings they'll have soccer games going on that we'll drive by. There's a playground too. Willow has often asked to go play there so she can run in the fields. Well, today was the day! It was much warmer this morning than my phone had said (not so "smart" eh???) so we didn't last too long but the kids had a great time running. 

Can you see her?

Zoomed in as far as I could go:

We came back home and cooled off in the sprinklers and enjoyed an orange for snack:

We've even gotten in some "learning time" so far. I'll have to go more thoroughly through my teaching supplies but Willow has already picked out a few things:

Owen enjoyed the tape measures. Everything was 14".

I saw this as a fine-motor development idea on Pinterest. Willow enjoyed it too!

Willow usually doesn't show much interest in batting, which is one of Owen's top activities in the backyard. But, tonight she spent a good 15 minutes batting with Gramps and Gramma....and she did GREAT! Check them out here.

She was very serious about her "batting face:"