A World of Learning

 I have three students who I'm teaching the sounds of the letters of the alpabet. Two of them, I know, are very familiar with the fact that Z says zzzzzz. The third is a three-year-old who is just beginning to learn the sounds, and I haven't yet tested her to see what she knows.  It's also amusing that this girl says a few of the letter sounds the same way. C and T are good examples. They both sound like "ch." We're working on it, but she does say some words with a bit of a ... I wouldn't call it an impediment, but with a three-year-old way of talking.  It's going to be difficult, especially at first, to get her to say the letter sounds correctly. But I know that she'll grow out of it.  I also have a five-year-old boy who often forgets certain letter sounds, though we've been going over them for quite a while. He always remembers S and Z though, as he loves to say, with loud enthusiasm, SSSSSSS! And ZZZZZZZ! ☺

 St. Patrick's Day! I love wearing green on that day. I love getting into any holiday. And apparently does one of the students I stay with before she goes to school.  I only saw her that day, so, unlike last year, I only got her picture. I also got a photo of the neclaces I was wearing along with my green shirt.  It was a fun day anyway, despite not seeing if the other kids were wearing green as well. My family and I had a traditional St. Patrick's Day dinner - Irish soda bread and corned beef! (No cabbage for us) I hope you had a fun day, and I hope you got into the holiday spirit and put on some green yourself!  I was waiting in line to pick up some medication, and there was a really long line. So I started talking to the elderly man in line behind me. He was wearing dark green pants and a green shirt, which he said was completely by accident that he was wearing them that day! We chatted about a lot of miscellaneous things.  I know this blog post doesn't have ...

 I often play Bingo with my students, using words that they have been learning or letters to identify or say the sounds the letters make when they find the letters on their boards. Today I was playing Bingo with an almost-4-yr-old boy, with the spaces on the boards depicting letters of the alphabet and a word that started with the letter shown on each individual space, the boy having to say what sound the letter made. He was pretty good at it. He knew almost every sound the letters made. In order to play, I had him pulling plastic letters out of an old tissue box that I turned into a cat face, making it into our "alphabet box." We placed little wooden blocks on our spaces when we found the letter on our boards that he pulled out of the box. We'd been playing for about ten minutes and he was close to getting a Bingo. All he needed was an S. So instead of reaching into the opening of the box without looking to find out what letter he got, he was looking into the box and pus...

 When I was tutoring on Monday, the sun was out after a long period of rainy days! This was great, but it seemed to be making the kids I tutored act silly!  The third-grade girl kept reading the wrong word in her storybook intentionally and laughing.  The five-year-old boy was playing the "toss the ball" game with me to say the sounds of the letters of the alphabet, and he kept tossing the ball to me and spinning around instead of standing still so I could toss the ball back.  The preschooler was also playing the toss the ball game, and she would hold out her hands when it was her turn to catch the ball, then letting it fall right to the floor. She would laugh and fall to the floor in a heap to get the ball back.  It got to be a little annoying, all three of them, but hey, they're kids, and I had to cut them some slack.