Language Arts

After a frantic rush to learn to read, Julia suddenly dropped the effort one day and moved onto other things. She'll still sight read the words she knows, do the trick where she uses some letter clues and pictures on the page to decipher new words, and even "read" memorized books aloud, but she's less interested in sounding out new words phonetically and frankly, I'm glad. The intensity of her effort was a tad scary there for a bit.

She still remains captivated by language, though, and is particularly entranced by Shel Silverstein's new book, Runny Babbit. The playful use of letters and words delights her, and we're all salking tilly a bit here lately.

In addition, she's been more focused on writing and has finally mastered all but 2 or 3 letters of the alphabet. This gives her a whole new creative outlet:

Julia: Look, Mom -- I wrote a word!

Me: N - o - q - s. Noqs?

Julia: Yeah, noqs. That's how you say "coloring" in Hebrew. Here's another one...

Me: B - l - o - u - s. Blous?

Julia: Uh huh. That's "stroller" in Spanish. And here --

Me: K - a. What's ka?

Julia: It actually should be kas.

Me: Huh? What's kas?

Julia: Like when you say that thing kas 15 dollars.

So much more fun than the easy reader books ever were...