What We Have Been Up To

Over the last 3 months we have been up to a bunch of fun things. She is writing!!! Huge for her. She does not write out of her imagination but if I tell her a very basic sentence she will produce it on the white board. The first thing she ever wrote was her name shortly after her 5th birthday (November). 

Blue writing is mine and the red is hers. I was a proud momma that day :-)

I asked her to spell her brother's name "Michael" - She spelled it how sounds.

These are the first two sentences she ever wrote - And yes, she is in mid nose pick :-)

I am so impressed with her! 

So these next two pictures - Her new craze is Big Hero 6. If you have not seen it, I suggest watching it, It is very cute! The snowman looking thing is Baymax. This first one CJ's nanny drew (CJ has a Russian nanny during the week so I can focus on Ashlynn) and the bottom one AJ drew. The black figures on the top is her and her brothers with Baymax, The bottom is Bayax and Hero. This is the first time she actually produced something completely imaginative. 

Baymax and Hero

When I homeschool Ash, we go through all the the motions of going to school. She gets her backpack, lunch box with a snack, and we leave the house and walk to the Community Center and use one of the rooms as a classroom. It is so convenient because no one uses the game room (Billiard Tables, FoosBall and card tables) during the day and it is a wide open quiet space for her to concentrate. We were working out of our house but she was very distracted and separating home from school was not going well. She is doing much better now. 

On our way to "school"

Her CiCi and Papa got her a really cool personalized coloring pad 2 christmas's ago that we are using as a "follow the direction" activity.

This bottom picture has shapes that coincide with colors - I tell her a shape and she has to color it the right color. 

I have been playing some Phonics games with her. These are velcro back pictures and she has to pick out the ones that start with "A" then the ones with "B" and all the rest of the letters. I enjoy this game because she has to say what the image is, then really think about what that first sound is. There was A LOT of tears this day - especially with the letters K, N, O, X, & Y. Lots of "I Can't Do it". As a teacher this is a hard phrase to hear but hearing as a parent who happens to be the teacher is a much deeper wound. It breaks my heart seeing her struggle and loose confidence. 

This activity I was extremely proud of and loved watching her create "herself" - I had saved some of the big packing paper they used in our shipments over here for drawing paper. I laid her down and traced her body. Then told her to put some clothes on her friend and label the head, arms, hand, and legs. I just wanted her to point them out to me but she insisted on writing the word. Not going to say no to that!!

What I didn't expect was for her to color in the person to be an exact replica of her self! She colored in the skirt with polka dots just like hers, colored black leggings, even made the Rainbow Dash jacket (She's obsessed with My Little Pony). The only thing that I did on this whole picture was obviously trace her but I also added the Purple to Rainbow's eyes. Everything else was 100% Ash. 

"Look Mom! The Same!" 

She did a super job! This was about 2 weeks ago