Emma can read!

Well, almost... I've been so proud of my little Emma lately - she's just been really growing up on me all of a sudden. She's been loving her swim lessons and is getting to be such a good little swimmer. She's been doing great in preschool, with big strides in her writing (she can finally write her name by herself!) She's also becoming such a great conversationalist. She says the funniest things to me... I love it. Also, for the past few months we've been working on her reading. Ben's family (full of educators!) has a reading program that they follow which starts with learning 40+ sound symbols - many of which are the actual letter in the alphabet - others are new symbols which each represent a different sound in the english language.... so to sum up, it's basically a unique phonics program - there's a long string of books you start with (once they know all the sounds really well) that utilize the sound symbols to make words and phrases (in the video below you can kind of see what I'm talking about). At the end of the book series you transition to the traditional Dick and Jane books which no longer use the symbols, but by this point, the transition to all regular letters is quite smooth. I've been so impressed with Emma's cousin who was reading Dick and Jane books on his own before turning 4 - I really was excited to get Emma doing it to. And Emma is the type of girl that loves this kind of thing - she loves sitting down to the school time with me and loves doing her preschool homework. Wonderful! That will definitely make things easier when she starts kindergarten and beyond! She also gets lots of incentives (stickers, prizes, etc) for reaching certain milestones within her reading. She zipped through the first 3 books really quick, but we've been working on this 4th book for quite a while now - it really jumped up in difficulty with a lot of new words - we had to go back and work on her basics and do some more sound review... but just yesterday she finally did it! And all on her own! Emma also shows off some of her quirkiness in this video. She's so weird, but I love her. :)