A World of Learning

 Hello again, folks! I hope you are enjoying your summer! It's been pretty nice here, all in all. I love warm weather! I love to sit out in the sun and read!  But, enough about me.  I tutor a little girl named Ruby, who is only three years old. She is still learning to identify the letters of the alphabet, and while we do play a matching game with all the letters, I'm really focusing on the letters in her name. R-U-B-Y.  I show her a letter and ask her what it is. I show her an R and she says A. So I show her what an A looks like and then show her the R again. I tell her it's the first letter of her name (which I have done many times, telling her it's an R.) I ask her what letter it is, and she says B. So I show her the B. I tell her it's a B. Then I show her an R again. I say, "It's the first letter in your name. R for Ruby." Then I ask her what comes next, and she says "woo" (U.) I show her the U and put it next to the R. Then I point to th...

I like to keep changing up the games that the kids play, so they don't get bored with any one particular game. Using tongue depressors with letters on them gives the kids a challenge to spell some of the words on their "word list," words they are learning how to say correctly. Sometimes I set my timer on my phone for 5 minutes to see how many words they can spell in that amount of time, or I'll set the stopwatch to see how long it takes them to spell a predetermined number of words that I've picked out.  For example, Elliot is learning to spell "no," "it," "big," and "at." Elsie's words are "there," "who," clip," "end," "saw," etc.  And then there's Robert. He is ten years old and I need to give him 9th grade words for his lists.  Right now he's learning how to spell "inhibit," "nemesis," and "rhapsody." I also treat them as vocabulary wor...

 One of the boys that I tutor, along with several girls that I help teach in Kids' Church, were part of the Fourth of July parade this year! One of our church members was so kind as to let us use (he drove) his antique truck pulling a trailer that the kids could decorate and stand in to throw candy. We were in the annual town photo, then headed a few blocks away to where the truck was waiting. We had decorated it the day before, so I'm thankful to God that we didn't have any moisture during the night to mess things up!  The kids had so much fun throwing candy (and eating it!) after we had to wait in the trailer for 45 minutes for our part of the parade to start moving! We ran out of candy, generously donated by our church members, two-thirds of the way through the parade. I don't know if it's because the kids were throwing too much at a time, or if we just didn't have enough candy. I think we didn't have enough candy, because we separated it all into separat...