bead spelling

After a full day of school, Sasha often isn't terribly enthusiastic about focusing another hour and a half of her attention on practicing her literacy skills. She often wants to do things like jumprope or play on the swings or sing and dance or work on a craft project. However, she also knows that our tutoring time is designated reading and writing time.

But Sasha is clever. She has started figuring out ways to incorporate reading and writing into these other activities. And she knows that as long as she can find a way to include reading and writing, I'll almost certainly say "yes" to whatever she wants to do.

Recently, she really wanted to make a necklace. So she proposed a spelling activity. Each bead she picked up correlated with the next letter in the word she was spelling aloud.

Although this just looks like a regular necklace, she made it by spelling night, bright, slightly, might, knight...

High fives,
-MP

bingo

Made Sasha some Bingo sheets with our latest word set (words with gh).

This game is super easy to make, since you can draw a grid and fill it with any sight words you're working on learning, and use nearly anything for markers -- I had some colorful gemstones on hand, but pennies or legos or dry beans or torn scraps of paper work just as well.

Hugs,
-MP

Bananagramarama

I introduced Sasha to a new literacy game recently. I actually got the idea from El, whose son (close to Sasha's age, and also in a similar developmental stage in regards to literacy) invented a similar game himself using a Scrabble board and tiles.

There are only two rules:
1. Players take turns using letter tiles to invent new words. Only made-up words count, no words that are already real words.
2. You have to say your word out loud and give it a definition.

A big area of development for Sasha right now is phonemic awareness, which is basically the correspondence between letters and sounds. This shows up in both her decoding efforts (also known as "sounding it out") and her spelling and writing attempts.

This variation on Scrabble or Bananagrams is great for helping kids work on their phonemic awareness. Yes, the words are silly nonsense words, but that takes the (enormous) pressure off of reading or spelling the words "correctly." But the game still has players working with the basic building blocks and rules of the written English language. It doesn't feel as intimidating as spelling and reading "real" words, plus it makes kids feel powerful to invent their own words -- the sillier-sounding, the better -- and definitions. Providing literacy opportunities for kids where they can feel powerful and in control helps build their confidence in their emerging reading and writing skills. For kids like Sasha for whom literacy is a challenge and a frequent source of anxiety, I cannot overstate how essential it is to prioritize confidence-building activities like this one.

When we played, at Sasha's request we just turned all of the letter tiles face up and chose whichever letters we wanted; you could also play a version more like Bananagrams or Scrabble, where players receive a certain number of face-down tiles at the beginning, and replace them with more randomly-selected tiles as they place their tiles on the board. The grid paper in the photo was something I made to provide Sasha with a little bit of structure; lots of our words extended off the edges as we continued playing. As an added challenge, you could color-code the board and add a points system like Scrabble (or just use an actual Scrabble board!).

As her own extension of the activity, Sasha suggested that we use our invented words to create a secret language. She diligently wrote down every word we created and its translation, and then constructed sentences in code. She had a lot of fun with this activity, and we'll definitely keep adding to our secret language dictionary as we replay the game!

Hugs,
-MP

Gamifying Literacy, take 2

It all started when I found this little thing at my local game store.

So my challenge was to build a board game around it. I wanted to make a game that was more complex than my last board game; involves some math (and ideally skip counting, since Sasha is working on that concept in class); incorporates strategy and not just probability; requires players to read, write, and move their bodies; and would provide a platform for players to become more familiar with sentence anatomy (nouns, verbs, and adjectives).

Here's what I came up with.

Twister with a twist

Sasha said she wanted to have our tutoring session at home this week. Usually we're in a cafe, which has its advantages (no toddler or dog or neighbor kid interruptions) and its disadvantages (limitations on resources, space, noise).

At home, Sasha got really excited about the idea of "making a game." After some initial blanking on how the game should work or what it should be about, Sasha realized we could adapt one of her existing games into a reading game. We perused the game closet and she picked Twister.

We selected a bunch of her flash card words to write on strips of masking tape. When I spun the spinner and called out the combination ("Left hand blue!") she had to read aloud the word on whichever circle she picked. (We also tried a version where I just called out a word and she had to hit it, but that was much more physically challenging.)

She's still working on discerning left and right. You can't see it in the picture, but she had me write a big R and L on her corresponding hands and feet to help her figure out which to use on each turn.

She had a great time with this game, and really took ownership over this project. One of the best things I can do as a tutor is to recognize and support opportunities for Sasha to be her own teacher, to tap into her own ingenuity and resourcefulness in meaningful, fun ways.

High fives,
-MP

gamifying literacy

Every week when planning Sasha's literacy tutoring session, I invariably trawl Pinterest for ideas before I do anything else. And invariably, I throw up my hands in frustration and end up doing my own thing. Because most of the "literacy" or "reading" pins in the Kids category aren't innovative games, or sensory-related writing activities, or anything that sounds like it would actually be fun -- just worksheets. I never want to see the word "printables" again, ugh. And this time of year, a lot of the available worksheets aren't just unimaginative, they're racist too. Double ugh.

So this week I did what I usually do when Pinterest serves as anti-inspiration: I made my own activities.

Sasha, like most human beings, enjoys games. Our usual flashcard matching games have gone a bit stale, so I made a new game. A board game. With dice and cards and everything.

This game is super simple. Roll the dice, move your piece (dinosaur toys, since I've got a bit of a collection going), do what it says on the space you land on. I made three stacks of cards: one stack of sight words Sasha is still working on, one stack of sight words Sasha has already mastered (the ones with smiley face stickers), and one stack of sentence cards. The sentences are all derived from or related to the books I've read aloud to Sasha over the course of the last year (Harry Potter #1-3, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Dealing with Dragons, and Holes). The game takes about 10-15 minutes from start to finish to play, and it took me about 45 minutes to make (including writing all of the sentence cards -- I already had the two piles of sight word cards from our previous tutoring sessions).

Here's the gameboard.

Sasha loved the game. As soon as we finished she asked to play it again. Three times in a row. The element of chance provided by rolling dice and the goal of progressing along the path from start to end helped to alleviate the "chore" feeling that can come with reading flashcards and random sentences.

Sasha asked me what the game was called, and when I admitted that I hadn't named it, she got out our markers and dubbed it "run to the end." She especially liked the "whirlpool" spaces, and would enthusiastically spin her dinosaur around and around before tipping it over from "getting dizzy" when she landed on one. She even suggested, after the third consecutive game, that we start keeping a tally of how many times we each won.

This game will definitely be making a reappearance at future tutoring sessions.

High fives,
-MP

homemade preschooler gifts, take 2

My cousin's kid just turned three, so rather than buy him a gift this year, I made him one! I try to create handmade gifts when I can. This one was super easy.

The little bag was just a piece of scrap fabric sewn (shoddily) in about ten minutes, with a bit of extra ribbon threaded through the top seam so that it cinches closed. The card is just a magazine photo gluesticked onto cardstock.

Unsurprisingly, the kid's favorite gift out of allllll of the puzzles, books, clothes, and toys he got was this little bag. Not the stuff in it, just the bag. "My purse!" he shrieked, slinging it over his shoulder and galloping off, leaving behind a wreckage of wrapping paper and much fancier gifts.

Here's what was in the bag:

Magazine photos glued onto wide popsicle sticks make a fun puzzle for little hands.

For double the fun, include a second "puzzle" on the back!

These are super fast and easy to make. Here's the tutorial I used. When the images start peeling off, you just glue 'em back down again. Maybe modgepodge them for extra durability if they get a lot of use. I'm not that dedicated.

Hugs,
-MP

Reading with Sasha

Since summer started, I've been tutoring Sasha once a week in literacy skills. Girl will happily sit and listen to me read aloud for literally as long as my voice holds out -- which is several hours, by the way -- but ask her to sound out the simplest word in the title of the next chapter and she completely shuts down. I've really been digging deep into my creative well to come up with unorthodox reading and writing activities for her to try during our tutoring sessions, all centered around specific sets of vowel sounds introduced sequentially.

We've done lots of reading and writing that engage different senses, as well as games like Hangman, Bananagrams, and match-the-flashcard-to-the-spoken-word.

writing in sand with a chopstick; we've also done fingers and feet

writing on felt with yarn segments

yes, that is a playdoh sculpture of the sea

  ...but she still fights it the entire two hours set aside for tutoring. She likes this stuff better than simply laboriously sounding out skull-numbingly dull Bob books for the frillionth time, but she'd still much rather be doing almost anything else. She stalls, she whines, she bargains, she toys with anything not bolted down, she literally lays down on the floor and covers her face. Coaxing her to read is a monumental act of patience and persistence.

I did some research on it several months back and I'm fairly certain the kid has dyslexia. She's got just about every symptom on the books. I was all jazzed to teach myself how to be a dyslexia-specific tutor for Sasha, but when I brought it up with her parents, they noncommittally shrugged and said that their "instincts say she's just on a slower path." I talked with Sasha's first grade teacher at the end of the school year and he agreed she was showing some signs of dyslexia. He asked me to encourage her parents to get her tested so that, if needed, she could get an IEP (individualized education program) for second grade. Unsurprisingly, they decided not to test her. They prefered to wait it out, see how regular tutoring went, maybe reevaluate sometime in the unspecified future.

Well, here we are at the end of summer, and she's made a little progress, but not a whole lot. She still balks at any opportunity to develop her literacy skills. Even when we're engaged in imaginative play and an opportunity arises for low-pressure writing -- such as writing tickets and placards for our "art gallery" -- she'll almost certainly decide we don't need to do that part even when it was her idea to begin with, or she'll opt for scribble writing. (Scribble writing is an important pre-literacy "representational thinking" skill, but typically kids start incorporating actual letters once they begin developing phonemic awareness around age 3 or 4.)

a classic example of Sasha's scribble writing

 The thing is, I'm not equipped to tutor her if she has a learning disability unless I get specific training for it. And if her parents don't want to explore that possibility, I'm kind of stuck. So, with the start of second grade looming, I plunged back into googling things like "my 7-year-old hates reading" and sifting through the resulting avalanche of parenting forum advice.

Through parent recommendations, I found an online program that looks like it might be a good fit for Sasha -- very short daily lessons, game-based, lots of actual rewards mailed to your actual door, funny characters, British accents. And designed with dyslexia in mind, but not exclusively marketed that way. It's got a complete moneyback guarantee at any time, and stellar reviews. So I mentioned it to Sasha's parents.

And they seem willing to try it out!

I'm really relieved, because I've felt like the burden of teaching Sasha how to read and write has fallen squarely on me, but unless she gets instruction tailored to kids with dyslexia (or whatever cognitive challenge she's got going on), she just won't make much progress. This online program could be the solution.

All this has made me reflect on how I intend to parent my own potential future children. I do hope that I'll be the kind of parent who, when someone close to my child says, "hey I think your kid has a learning disability," that I will take it seriously, do the research to see if it seems likely, and try to address it appropriately as early as is reasonable. I hope I don't instantly dismiss it.

I hope this online program turns out to be the Thing That Works, and that someday Sasha will enjoy reading as much as she enjoys being read to.

High fives,
-MP

experimenting

This summer I'm babysitting Jaden for a few hours a week, and he has become my official test subject for science activities for four-year-olds. I've been getting all these great ideas for preschool science from my Young Child as Scientist grad school course, and from good ol' Pinterest, but since I'm not based out of a classroom, I haven't really had an outlet for my kid science excitement. (Most activities I get stoked about -- and can realistically carry out in someone else's home -- are a little too juvenile for Sasha's sophisticated tastes.) So I got Jaden's parents' permission to experiment on their kid.

luck

Sasha is on a clover kick; whenever we're outside, she's hunting for four leaf clovers. (We've found six so far, in one specific patch in her front yard.)

Because I'm nothing if not an opportunist, I latched onto her casual interest to goad her into some biology-related inquiry and scientific investigation. We compared and contrasted the different types of clover we found, examining everything from leaf color and size to stem shape. We counted leaves, looked at spines and veins, and speculated about the evolutionary history of each kind. Sasha even nibbled on all of them to see if any tasted as good as the sorrel (which looks like a giant clover; it's the big one in the picture) does. Now on our walks home from school, she regularly stoops down to pick some sorrel from the neighbor's abundant flower bed, and chews it for rest of the walk.

Hugs,
-MP

Harry Potter Playlist

Sasha is still really into Harry Potter. When she's not begging me to read the first three books aloud again, she's plying me with questions about Harry's universe. Luckily for Sasha, I am something of a Harry Potter geek. I was quite the trivia wizard in my day, and I've still got the cosplay costumes to prove my nerd cred.

I recently told Sasha about the great cultural phenomenon called Wizard Rock, which is essentially a genre of music with lyrics pertaining to the Harry Potter universe. The musical groups that fall into this genre often write and perform songs from the perspectives of JK Rowling's characters (like the band Draco and the Malfoys, who dress, act, and talk like Draco Malfoy) or from invented characters who don't exist canonically (like The Parselmouths, a girl duo who perform as two random Hogwarts students in Slytherin House).

Sasha was immediately intrigued by my description of wizard rock, so I promised to make her a CD of wizard rock songs. I had two major constraints when selecting songs: they needed to be about books 1-3 (and avoid major spoilers from books 4-7, mainly because it would be confusing and irrelevant to Sasha), and they needed to be appropriate for a 6-year-old. Pretty much as long as they didn't have sex, drugs/alcohol, or "bad words," they passed my "appropriate" test.

Click "read more" to see the playlist!

snack time is math time!

I don't know what Sasha's kindergarten "Montessori-inspired" classroom was like last year, but for whatever reason, she's behind most of her first grade classmates in both literacy and mathematics. Kid can't say or sing the ABCs straight through or reliably count to 20, let alone do spelling or addition and subtraction. And her homework this week included all of those things.

Sasha's dad keeps talking about hiring a tutor, but hasn't gotten around to it. We have all been transitioning Sasha to a "homework first, movies later" policy. Sasha's dad bribes her with "treats" (coloring books and the like) if she does any extra reading beyond the daily 15 minutes required by her teacher, which works sometimes. We're doing a Reading Scavenger Hunt every Wednesday in lieu of flashcards or early reader books.

Her reading skills are slowly but definitely improving.

Math, though. Math is something I haven't done with her much, since up until now the homework packet has been primarily an oops-we-put-the-whole-thing-off-until-Thursday-night ordeal, and I work for Athena's family on Thursdays.

This week, as Sasha poured herself a bowl of bunny grahams for her afterschool snack and we turned to her math homework, I was struck with the memory of doing "snack math" in first or second grade and loving it. Whether we were counting with M&Ms or goldfish crackers, I loved getting to eat my work at the end of the session. So when mental math and counting on her fingers clearly weren't working well (Sasha only has 10 fingers after all, and the homework had her adding up to 15), I suggested we use the grahams.

 from google images

It totally worked to have the tactile visual aid, and Sasha loved when the homework asked for her to "take away" some number, because it meant she got to eat that number of grahams!

Definitely recommend, would do again.

High fives,
-MP

finding literacy

I am on a continual quest to invent creative ways for Sasha to practice reading. This week, I made a scavenger hunt for her. The deal was she had to read (and sound out) the clues herself, and at the end would be a prize, plus the whole thing would count as her 15 minutes of nightly reading homework.

The clues were very simple, because the decoding challenge for Sasha is the reading part; I didn't want her to have to decipher an obscure rhyme too. I just wrote them in Sharpie on index cards and then hid them around the house, with the starting clue on the table where Sasha eats her afterschool snacks.

It was enormously successful. Sasha loved it. Afterward, she used the prize (a small notebook and pen) to write her own sentences, starting with "today is good," but she said that she likes the "finding better than winning" in scavenger hunts. Good thing, because my supply of regiftable tiny notebooks is drying up!

We will definitely be repeating this activity again. Maybe every week. Depends on how quickly I run out of notecards.

Hugs,
-MP

Magic in a Box

I expect the average six-year-old to be a veritable geyser of imagination. Around Sasha's house I see evidence of her imaginative play: toys arranged around a castle, sticky notes with scribbled "writing" posted here and there, dress-up clothes scattered across the bedroom floor. But rarely do I actually see Sasha playing, and anytime I suggest or try to instigate imaginative play, Sasha gives me her sassy teenager hands-on-hips-and-eyeroll smackdown. She prefers that I read to her or let her watch Spongebob.

This week Sasha's dad brought home a large box, discarded by the coworker who ordered the desk chair it had contained.

I have never seen so much creative play out of this kid as I have in the presence of this box.

We sat in our box "house" during a pretend storm; thunder and lightning exploded all around us; the floodwaters rose and swept us out to sea; we battled a giant squid and a sea serpent; we eventually crashed on an island where the green-bearded pirate had buried his treasure, which of course we found.

Another day, we got out paints and added details to the box: hearts and butterflies and flowers, stars on the ceiling, swatches of color on the inside walls.

Ezra gets good use out of it too: he and I play endless games of hide-and-peek-a-boo in and around the box. (He joined us for the pirate adventure too.)

This box is like magic, extracting from Sasha the desire to play, to innovate, to invent, and to create. Praise be for big boxes.

High fives,
-MP

homemade preschooler gifts: gak

HB and I got ourselves invited to the birthday party of the almost-three-year-old that HB nannies. We wanted to give him a gift that would be handmade and a hands-on sensory experience. So we decided to make gak!

After scouring online recipes and waffling about borax versus Metamucil as one of the key ingredients (borax may be harmful if swallowed), we decided to just go with borax since we had it on hand for making homemade laundry detergent, whereas we would have had to buy a big container of Metamucil just to get less than a tablespoon of the stuff for the recipe. We figured we'd put a warning label on the jar of gak to alert the parents about borax being potentially toxic. Both the three-year-old and his one-year-old sister don't put much non-food stuff in their mouths anymore, so we figured the borax gak would be safe enough. Gak is a good supervision-required activity anyway, since it's notoriously difficult to dig out of carpet fibers.

We used one of the many recipes online for flubber (one of the many aliases of gak). HB had an excellent time mucking about mixing the gak ingredients while I made the jar label, and she speculated that making the gak would actually be an awesome activity to do with kids, as long as they're old enough to keep their hands out of their mouths. The part that took the longest by far was kneading food coloring drops into each chunk of gak before we dropped each into the jar. (We figured the kids would mix all the colors together sooner or later anyway, so we didn't bother to divide the colors into different jars.)

To finish off the gift, we included a Gak Explorer Kit made from objects we scrounged up around the house: chopsticks, straws, and plastic knives slipped into a never-worn lone toe sock.

Maybe you will decide to do this for a preschooler in your life too! And if you're as mature as us, you'll save a chunk of the gak for yourself so that you can plunge it in and out of a salvaged salsa container to simulate flatulence sounds. You will spend a solid half hour doing this and giggling madly after the kid you're babysitting that night has fallen asleep.

High fives,
-MP

Harry Potter Holidays

Sasha had Friday and Monday off from school, so I wanted to make sure I had plenty of activities prepared to keep her busy for two whole days. Since we've been reading the Harry Potter books together, and she loves the hell out of 'em, I thought she would enjoy a load of Harry Potter themed activities.

My criteria for activities was:

1. It must be fun.
2. It must support learning.
   (Literacy, science, art, physical activity, music, social skills, problem solving, etc.)
3. It must be relevant and doable for a single six-year-old who has only read the first two Harry Potter books.

I searched the internet for "Harry Potter activities for kids," but almost everything that came up was kind of pathetic. I tend to shy away from things that restrict kids' creativity, so pretty much any website that started with the words "free printables" was off the table. Coloring a pre-printed owl or doing a crossword puzzle? No thanks. One "top ten" list of Harry Potter games for kids I found was almost entirely composed of screen-oriented activities like marathoning the movies, downloading an iWand iPhone app, and playing trivia online. As much as I love the occasional movie marathon, that's not really a great option for Sasha, since a.) we have enough power struggles over movies as it is and b.) she already vetoed watching the movies because she thinks they will be too scary for her, and she's probably right.

What's a nanny to do?

Make her own activities, of course! Here's my lineup of fun, educational Harry Potter activities, after the cut.

Leaf Puppets

The last week or so, Sasha has more cheerful and easygoing than she has been for the last few months. Perhaps she's finally adapted to the school routine, or to having a new baby brother, or to having a new nanny; perhaps it's some other unfathomable combination of variables. Either way, I'll take it. It certainly makes me more excited to plan activities for her, since she's more likely to be receptive to them!

On Wednesday this week I showed up to Sasha's house equipped with a box of googley eyes and a bottle of Elmer's glue. On the walk home from school (which was, mercifully, sunny) I started picking up fallen leaves. I explained, "I brought googley eyes and glue to your house, and so I thought we could collect some leaves and--"

Sasha interrupted, excitedly: "I have a great idea! We could put googley eyes on the leaves and make leaf puppets!"

Pretty much exactly what I was thinking, although it hadn't occurred to me to call them puppets, which implies that we might produce a puppet show. Awesome!

We did step 1: collect leaves, spread all over kitchen counter; and step 2: adhere googley eyes to the leaves and allow to dry. Sasha also got out her gel pens and drew freckles, a mouth, and other details on her favorite leaf.

We'll see if she's interested in using them as puppets on Friday.

Hugs,
-MP

Mystery Suprise Secret Color Reveal Playdough

On Fridays Sasha doesn't have any afterschool activities, so I have twice as much time with her as on the other days of the week. She is happiest -- and I am happiest -- if I provide her with structured activities to fill that three and a half hours until her parents and I swap places. If I don't plan anything, trusting the hypothetically boundless imagination and creativity of a six-year-old, we inevitably devolve into a tug-a-war over how many tv shows she ought to be allowed to watch in exchange for however many minutes or pages of academic busywork she is willing to complete. It's a lot of whining and dramatic fake tears and I'm so over it.

Earlier this week while one of the babies slept, I borrowed half a cup of salt, half a cup of water, and god knows how much flour to whip up a batch of playdough. In a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to alleviate that horrible playdough smell, I added vanilla extract, which really just made it smell weirder. So, maybe pick a different scent if you're going to Try This At Home.

While Sasha was at school, I separated out the playdough into balls, molded them into shapes sufficient to receive food coloring drops, and rolled them into balls so the food coloring was hidden on the inside of the balls. The idea was that as you start kneading each ball, the color is revealed! It's Mystery Surprise Secret Color Reveal Playdough!

I made the orange one as an example, or maybe I just spilled food coloring everywhere. Guess.

And then, if you feel like following directions beyond the exciting "what's inside" part which takes one second per ball of playdough, you knead the heck out of it until it's all a uniform color. Then you store each ball in empty and washed babyfood jars, for future use.

Sasha is unpredictable enough that I tend to approach any project I plan with "If she's even half interested it's a win. If she takes it in her own direction, go with it." So when she decided that, rather than fully knead each ball to produce uniform color and store each in its separate baby food jar, she wanted to smash all the half-mixed colors together into a "sandwich," I just cheerfully asked open-ended questions packed with science vocabulary like "hypothesis" and "theory."

"it's a sandwich with green bread"

With our greenish-yellowish-pinkish-orangish-brownish dough, we formed cakes and cookies, made imprints with nuts and leaves we'd collected last week, and played Playdough Monster, which was really just me chasing Sasha around trying to convince her to wash the playdough residue off hands so that I wouldn't "eat them."

That's a "cake" I made for Sasha while she sang Patty-Cake

It kept her entertained for 45 minutes, so I just need to come up with two or three more activities per Friday to totally avert the iPad wars.

Hugs,
-MP

Scavenger Hunt Bingo

I've been trying to think of ways to get Sasha out of the house to enjoy these last few warm, dry(ish) fall days, since the rains and the cold are just a storm system away. I whipped up a "Sasha's Fall Scavenger Hunt Bingo" page in half an hour one evening this week. Ecology plus reading fundamentals plus art, all in game format? I hoped she'd think it was fun and awesome, and not stupid or boring or too hard. She can be hard to predict.

Due to a roughhousing injury, Sasha had an abbreviated day at school on Friday. As she started a third episode of Rugrats on the iPad, the dog danced around nipping at us for attention with increasing desperation, and the baby upped his fussing, I tentatively suggested a walk. "Are you feeling better enough to go on a scavenger hunt?"

She considered the question briefly, then said, "I will be, after one more movie." (Movie meaning episode, in Sasha-speak.)

So 20 minutes later I crammed Ezra in the Ergo on my back, leashed up the dog, refused a "one more movie pleeeeease" request and reminded Sasha about the scavenger hunt, and we headed out. (I recommended a sweatshirt or coat but she balked and I didn't push it. She didn't seem cold on the walk, so one point for the "trust the kid to know their own needs" approach.)

She had such a good time with the scavenger hunt that she announced, "When we get back, I'm going to make you a scavenger hunt!" (She did, but by the time she'd finished drawing it she'd lost interest in going back outside.)

The only thing we absolutely could not find was slugs. I'm not convinced she actually saw a spider or any mushrooms because those two included some vague gesturing into bushes, but good enough. Although it wasn't in my original plan, she wanted to collect up the things that were reasonable to bring home; no live animals or pumpkins off the neighbor's porch.

All in all, a successful fall activity. Plus the dog got her walk, Ezra got some fuss-curing fresh air, and I got to totally bore Sasha with a few soliloquies about species of oak trees and photosynthesis and decomposition and adaptation.

Hugs,
-MP

reading recipes

Sasha has been really struggling with learning to read. She still mixes up some of her letters, the most mysterious to me being f and i. She knows about five sight words, one of which is her own name. She drags her feet doing her 15 minutes of reading homework each night.

I remember how frustrating and tedious it was to learn how to read when I was her age. She has the same set of Bob books I had; I hated those books because the stories were so boring, and Sasha seems to feel the same. (In my case, my slow reading was at least partially to blame on my eyesight; my reading improved by several grade levels within two months of getting glasses.)

But Sasha likes stories. She likes being read to. We just finished the first Harry Potter book, and I've promised to find a copy of the second one to start reading to her. I may have her sound out a few words per page of The Chamber of Secrets so that she's involved in reading a more interesting story than "Dot has a hat."

I've been trying to come up with creative ways to integrate letter recognition and rudimentary reading skills into other activities so that it doesn't feel like reading, doesn't feel like a 15 minute timer, doesn't feel like homework.

So today, I wrote out a chocolate chip cookie recipe, packaged up and labeled all of the ingredients and most of the equipment we would need, and biked it all over to Sasha's house. After school, after some regular ol' dollhouse and dress up playtime, and after doing 10 minutes of her assigned reading, we whipped up a batch of cookies. She liked measuring and dumping and cracking eggs, and she loved mixing the dough with her hands!

She wasn't thrilled when I asked her to sound out the words on the recipe paper, but she was a champ at just straight up matching recipe words to container labels, and then recognizing the ingredient in the containers ("that's brown sugar!"). Good enough for a first go.

I wonder, if I wrote and illustrated a book for her that's all about things Sasha can do, like "Sasha can cook! Sasha can kick! Sasha can sing! Sasha can read!" if that would be a more exciting story for her to read than "Mat sat." I'll let the idea bake for a bit.

Hugs,
-MP