Did anyone happen to pay attention to the groundhog?

Somehow groundhog's day passed me by, so I'm not sure what the prediction was, but the weather this week was absolutely fabulous!

I have to share exciting news about N. and her reading - she has just taken off in the last two weeks! And not just with her reading, but with her writing, too. She's been writing and illustrating stories, and now she's editing one that she wants to enter into the Young Writers and Illustrators contest. The final date submissions are due is March 7th, so she needs to hustle if that's going to happen. I think she may actually do it though. She's also been writing to some friends. The books she's been reading are from The Adventures of Benny and Watch series (early readers that spun off of the Boxcar Children series created by Gertrude Warner). I stumbled upon them when I was looking for a link to post for my last blog entry. They've really built up her confidence, and suddenly she's trying to read literally everything. She's attempting to read books, magazines, signs, cereal boxes - this is all completely new.

Interestingly, the desire to read and/or write seems to disappear once we pull out school work! At this point I've decided to handle it the way we've always handled asynchronous development in the past - if writing or reading isn't the skill being assessed, then I don't see a reason to push it. Our language arts curriculum uses "guided reading assessments" a few times/week. These are mainly to determine reading comprehension. In order to encourage N's new enjoyment of reading, I'm simply substituting the reading she's doing on her own and asking her questions about that, and then reading the LA stuff together (cuz the stories are actually pretty cool).

Tomorrow, N. and I are going to the Seattle Art Museum to see their new exhibit of ancient Roman art. This ties in really well with the era of history we've been studying for the past couple of months. Tomorrow is Family Day at SAM, and they have a lot of fun activities planned, so N. is pretty excited. Plus she gets to go with just Momma, and that makes it even more special. The boys are going to go do boy things outdoors somewhere.

And speaking of the boy child.... A. is currently into counting. He really likes to count, and he'll count just about anything. The more of something there is to count, the better. In the evening he'll lay on the living room floor on his tummy and count all the beads on the abacus. Today I bought a 200pc container of connecting cubes, which he promptly connected to make a snake, and then began counting one by one. I'm pretty sure he only made it to 100 because I remember him asking what came next, and I was distracted with something else, darn it. N. commented that she doesn't think she's ever counted to 100 because she never had a reason to. LOL - hard to argue with that logic! The funny thing is that both hubby and I can recall counting to ourselves as kids. I remember that I liked the patterns of the numbers - maybe it was soothing or something. We were both weird and introverted as children. Thankfully one of us grew out of it! ;P