moving

We listed our house and sold it in a month. We close next week. Now we are furiously working on moving. I am not sad about leaving this house even though there are a lot of memories in it. This last year it has felt so cramped that I am more than ready to move on. We bought this place when it was just the two of us working downtown and now we have two kids and both have jobs that require home offices so we need more space. We found a nice big place in a really family-oriented neighborhood. We are renting while we think about what we want to do next. We might decide to settle in for another few years here and buy a place, or we might move out of state for job opportunities. We are excited about all the possibilities and while we look at those we will enjoy more space. It is a lot of work for right now though .

Teaching reading

Well, for a while now I have used the Starfall.com website for teaching Kai letters and letter sounds and beginning phonics. He has learned a lot through it and I definitely recommend it for teaching these skills to toddler boys. However, recently Kai became a little bored with it and I began to try to encourage sounding out words using the "Bob" books. I was certain of success, but Kai did not respond well to the Bob Books. The style of sitting him down to sound out one-word sentences was not one for which he had any patience or attention span. After re-reading old materials on teaching styles that appeal to boys and reading additional resources I was reminded of the effectiveness of using hands-on learning methods with boys. My first idea was to make letters out of playdough and put those letters together to make short words. That idea worked! I tricked him into sounding out words! :) Then I found some Melissa and Doug wooden puzzles that require children to fit the letter pieces in to spell the word that represents the picture on the puzzle piece. This has been an excellent resource. he loves it and easily transitions from playing with the puzzle to using the letters to form other words. Within just a few days of these new methods I have seen some stunning progress over the hurdles of turning letter sounds in to a collection of sounds that form a word.

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