Reading Progress

Ella has been making totally astounding reading progress since school started. She blew through basically the whole year's "reading" curriculum in the first quarter. Seriously, her parent/teacher conference was awesome and made us feel like fantastic parents. Although, both Aaron and I agree, generally we do not have fond feelings about our own conferences. It is a totally new ball game with our amazing school girl! Not only does she LOVE school, she loves learning and is starting to love reading and that is really all we could hope for!

So, her teacher has started sending home these new books for Ella to use to work on her reading in addition to the regular classroom work that Ella does with her classmates. Every night she brings home a Bob Book and reads it to us then takes it back to school the next day and if she can read it to her teacher without help she gets another book to do it all over again.

And the amazing thing is that she can totally do it! Ella, my baby, can read a book by herself. Like actually read the words - not just memorize it after someone reads it to her. It totally blows my mind! She has finished the first set of Bob Books already and is on to the second. I totally recommend these books for beginning readers, I think it really boosts Ella's confidence to be able to read a whole book herself.

But the cutest thing of all - aside from Ella's excitement every day to read us a new book - is when I catch Ella reading to Avery and trying to teach her to read. Ridiculous cuteness. Cuteness overload!

The other cute thing that has been happening since school started is that Ella has been giving Avery "math lessons" that consist of Ella forcing Avery to recite her numbers and counting to 100 or when ever Avery gets bored, distracted or mad enough to quit. I will admit that Ella is a very patient teacher though, and effective because this morning Avery counted to 10 by 2s which I am pretty sure I never taught her :)