A good day for the kids

As my wife picked up our daughter from school yesterday, the Headmaster (Headmistress??) pulled them aside for a moment to show off what happened today. She showed our daughter a couple flash cards of short words with short vowel sounds (beginner reading words like CAT, MAT, BAT) and Audrey actually read them! Then they set out a string of words to make a sentence: SAM IS A MAN. And she read it. We worked some more after dinner last night writing more of those short beginner words and she was doing really, really well. Sounding things out properly, though not quite squishing the sounds together efficiently yet. Of course, her brother was constantly hinting as well, so sometimes it was hard to tell where her attention lies. Still, I'm impressed - at just over 4 years old she's picking this up very well!

Every morning at the breakfast table while I referee the kids, I'll read the morning paper over my cereal. On the weekends, I do the puzzles - Sudoku on Saturday, and Kakuro, Sudoku, and a crossword on Sunday. Of course the weekday papers have Sudoku as well, but they range from Very Easy on Mondy through Medium on Friday - the weekends are the only days with Hard puzzles. So every morning recently when I get to the end section, the kids are watching alertly for the number grid and then point out the difficulty and gauge how fast I could solve it. Yesterday, Jacob asked if he could start doing the easy ones. This morning's paper had a Medium puzzle, but Monday's paper was still in the recycling bin. I pulled it out and folded the paper up so he could work the puzzle. I told him the rules and started him off with a couple obvious entries. Then I jumped in the shower to return to a completed puzzle, but a mildly disappointed boy. Seems that towards the end he transposed a 6 and 7, throwing off two other numbers. He was frustrated because "there needs to be a 9 in this box, but this 9 is blocking it." But considering he worked through 90% of it alone and only goofed a bit at the end, I'm pretty impressed. He won't settle for the slow pace, but I'm planning on letting him do the Monday puzzles for a couple weeks before moving him up to Easy. I'm sure he thinks he's ready for Medium tomorrow, but I'm very proud of how well he did today!