First off before I forget, Edzea completed and passed into the highest level for swimming that she can do until she turns six. Tim took her to her last lesson on Monday. I have her signed up for the highest level now that she is going to end up repeating and repeating until she turns six and can join the Red Cross programs. A bit frustrating but she doesn’t know what level she is in. It’s just swimming lessons to her. I haven’t told her anything about levels.

But the thing I’m really proud of her for is her FEARLESS’ness. Tonight she was reading a new book. We do a new little book every two nights as we go through her “reading lessons” at night. Tim made a good point that this whole thing is win win for us. We’ve tied reading lesson at night to napping in the afternoon. No nap, no reading lesson. She LOVES her reading lesson so it works out pretty darn good for us.

Anyhow, I digress. After we finished book 11 in her 12 book series…she wanted to play some games on her chalkboard. The one she likes the most is simple. You write a word on the board. She sounds it out and guesses what it is. SHE LOVES THIS! 3 letter words are a snap for her now. And depending upon the sounds of the 4 & up letter words…she still tries and we throw new ones at her that have no bearing on her books. Anyways, we played this for quite a while tonight. She was so good it was fun to do. She laughs and giggles and says “you can’t stump me!” So, as a final one…I said well if I come up with something like Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious…you’ll be stumped. She says…write it Mommy write it…so I could barely fit it across the board and even though we both knew what it was, she started sounding it out from the beginning. She was sitting away from the board, not using her finger to keep track of letters and just kept sounding EVERY letter out until the end when she just laughed and said…expialidocious! That’s fearlessness. A 4 1/2 year old being completely unafraid and uninhibited about reading that she would attempt to tackle a word like that. We are blown away with her capacity to learn to read.It’s really fun to teach her!

Also, the cute part is that she is trying out words on us. She sounds out words and writes them out for us. It’s VERY phonetic. Like extremely literal. She corrects us with the word “stop”. She writes it “sdop” because to her that’s what it SOUNDS like.

Today she wrote on her board for me to guess: “siderele” which translated was Cinderella.

Then “cid” which was kid.

It’s very rewarding to teach her and she seems to truly enjoy it! Ok, that’s it off to bed.