Word Power

I absolutely love back to school shopping. Unlike the public schools, we don't have a specific time of year that we go "back to school". We homeschool year round with a few days off here and there. This year we took off about two weeks (okay maybe not that much) around Kevin's birth and are already back to work.

At Wal-mart I found this neat sentence strip chart. The cards that I bought to go with it are the reusable kind that you use with dry-erase markers. We haven't done anything formal with them yet. I just hung it up on the stocking hooks over the fireplace and let the girls have fun with it. Click on the picture to read what they wrote.

We are all amazed by Gloria who has just recently started writing all on her own. We've been working with her over the past year on letter recognition, sounding out words, and hand writing, but she started truly writing on her own just this week. She began by bringing me a letter she wrote. She sounded out all the words she wanted to say and came up with some clever invented spelling. For instance, she didn't remember how to spell "the" in "the end". So instead she used the letter "v" to write "v end" because "v" kind of sounds like "the". She wrote on all the cards closest to her in the photo and Danya did the ones on the other side.