Over the past few months, Ella has been looking at signs or words in a book or wherever, and really trying to sound things out on her own without us prompting her to figure things out. She has been doing a great job and is learning how to read words. Lately, she has also been really interested in writing. She writes her letters really well (for a 4 1/2 year old) and she has many words mastered like cat, bat, hat, fat, rat, mat…she makes “rhyming books” and is moving beyond her “at” words. Whenever she wants to write a “shopping list” or a card for someone, she asks us how to spell the words, and we basically just sound out the letters in the words with her and most of the time, she gets it correct. Just during the past few weeks, she has been trying to write words on her own. I know that at CDS, they teach inventive spelling where they encourage the child to spell their words the way they think they should be spelled. I am all for that, but lately Ella has been asking us if her words that she has done completely on her own are correct. I usually say, “That’s totally right for what you are doing…trying to sound it out”…and then Ella says, “But is it spelled right?” and I say, “it’s not really spelled right, but you are doing such a great job trying to figure out your words”. I hope I am responding correctly to her because I want her to continue to write on her own and take pride in what she’s doing. Here is a really cute example…Today was Ella’s last swimming lesson with her teacher Yat. Ella wanted to make him a card to thank him for teaching her. We sounded out all the words together that are in red – Ella really figured it out letter for letter with me sounding like a strange phonics machine. Then she drew some pictures and I was upstairs getting ready so when I came down, she had added a few words to her artwork. I will post the card now.
This is sweet Ella really proud of her card.
This is the front of the card. The person that she drew with the brown skin and curly hair is Yat. He is from India and has dark skin. We thought that was really cute and cool.
So we did the red words together by sounding out the words and then Ella wrote the green words all by herself. The first one, “sun” was great…the second one, “tweet” was fantastic. The third one…”Letee buggs” makes total sense, lady bugs of course. This is so exciting to watch Ella reach this level that is going to open up a whole new world for her.
Wow! I’m bringing the desk back downstairs. I have a feeling Ella is going to write a book during her visit to NJ. Love you. Mom