Wow. The entire month of October went by, and I didn’t manage to post the September 2008 photos until tonight.
A lot happened in September. We moved to our new apartment and moved the kids into beds. Albert and Erin came out to attend a wedding and visited for a few days. The kids started at their new school.
I partly credit the new school for a lot that the kids have been learning recently. We haven’t really been teaching the kids to continue counting beyond twenty, but we found that they could continue up to twenty-nine. Then, Miranda guessed that the next number was twenty-ten. Unfortunately, as we made our way up to forty, she also guessed that there might be a thirty-ten.
Miranda has also been able to sound out the first letter for many words. She’ll ask what different words start with, then repeat the word over and over to get the initial sound, and then declare what she thinks it starts with. She’s often right, but gets tripped up on some words like “tree” or words that start with “ch”, “th”, “sh”, etc. I’ve tried helping her sound out whole words that she sees in our books, such as “bed”, but she can’t make the connection between the individual sounds and the entire word yet.
The kids have also been learning to express their emotions better, as well as start to think a bit about why things happen. This is part of the school education program. One day, Effy bought the kids some Sesame Street cookies in the shape of different letters. She found an M for Miranda, but couldn’t find an E. She gave Eleanor an F and said that Cookie Monster must have eaten part of it. Eleanor declared “That makes me sad!” before bursting into tears.
Because these pictures are so late, the kids’ development since the last monthly update is started to blur with what has been happening during October. I’ll just post those pictures soon, and continue the update from there.