Drawing dragons and reading

I think this rainy day -- still warm, mind you -- is the beginning of our new season. The last week has been gorgeous! We have all enjoyed being outside to rake leaves, take walks, work in our garden, and of course, trick-or-treat. (The candy is almost gone.) We have at least one more good raking that we need to do but suddenly most of our leaves are down and the skeletons of our trees bend over our old house. This would be an awful time of year for me to buy a house. Give me something that looks cozy, surrounded by old trees with piles of red, yellow and brown everywhere and I would be smitten.

Julia is doing more testing than usual. Her daily school behavior report is coming home with incidents during which she disrupted the class in circle time -- something she has not done for awhile -- but with a smile on her face. She refuses to do some work, notably math, and then settles down to it and does it well. She is also stuttering again. At the same time, she is sounding out the beginnings of words like crazy. Now it is Julia who instigates the game and it is not as much of: "Duh, duh, t-Rex," and more often: "Te, te, T-Rex." When she makes a mistake with the letter, I can ask her to repeat the word and more times than not she can say the correct letter to begin the word. She is also guessing at the vowels that come next, getting them wrong often due to her own pronunciation.

The other night she took a little book out of my hands and said: "Mommy, I read this." And she did. These are pattern books with two lines on each page, and she still has them mostly memorized, but she is moving along. She is recognizing the sight words that we have been working on as well -- not all the time, but she is.

From school, I get the report that she is doing some number work. She is recognizing numbers at home although we don't do much number work other than counting.

And her drawing . . . .