The holiday season is behind us and we reluctantly surrender to everyday life again. If I could have one wish for the holidays this year it would be to be perfectly healthy. Four weeks later and I'm still battling a stuffy nose, although my midwife assures me that its a normal part of pregnancy. Not one that I'm enjoying much though.
So as for change, with each midwives appointment we get closer to having a new baby in our lives and try as you might, I'm not sure you can ever be fully prepared. Savanna is now walking around saying she is having a baby sister for Junior Asparagus (think VeggieTales).
It seems we have just about everything except for a place for the baby to sleep. To move or not to move, to subdivide and make another room, to have the baby in our room for a while, those are the things on the table right now. Personally, I'm not in favour of room sharing as I found with Savanna that both of us slept better apart. Myself being a light sleeper, I would wake up at every little murmur and mumble.
We are also getting into more of a learning routine. I have started to put a bit more structure into our days. I try to do some math and some language everyday mixed with a few days of science and her gymnastics and soccer. It seems to be working well so far. Savanna loves her math and is at the Senior Kindergarten level-not bad for a four year old. I'm anxiously awaiting the arrival of the library books I ordered on math games.
I also noticed something I found very interesting this week. I was getting very frustrated when I would ask her to name letters on a sheet or the whiteboard (I knew that she knew them), she would get some right, some she would guess at and it just seemed as though she had lost interest. So I switched things up a bit and brought in some foam letters, making it into a game-her accuracy went up to about 97%! I don't know if it was the tactile part of it or being a game that it was much more interesting, but I'm glad it worked.
It's a challenge but its greatly rewarding. The great thing is that it only takes about two hours a day (broken up into little chunks) to cover a lot of material and it leaves a lot of time for the most important activity of all-being a kid.
I know i Posted on your earlier post to check out my blog later today but thought I would add more now after reading this post. Tessa and I have been working on creating some games to play to help with learning. And oddly enough she has been having trouble recognizing letters all of a sudden (as you mentioned...I know that she knows them too!) So ive been spending most of my time this week creating flash cards (more like a deck of cards actually) and thinking up and searching pinterest for games to make it all fun. If you are on pinterest check out my Reading board for all the new games ive pinned. Most (probably all actually) can be adapted to incorporate letters, numbers, colours, shapes and sight words. Tessa informed me that she wants to learn to read right now so ive been writing out sight word lists and stuff. Anyways...email me if your not on pinterest and i can send you an add or just my list of games. or search for me. Laura Butler and my picture is the same as it shows here on my comments.
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