sight words

peyton is learning sight words now in kindergarden and doing great. she likes to say the word then try and use it in a sentence. yesterday the word was 'as' and she was pretty close on the pronunciation. her sentence was pretty"get your as over here." oops!

Enjoying summer

This summer was Cianna's first experience with a "summer break." I thought it was important to emphasize that this does not mean a complete break from academics, so we bought a summer bridge book for both girls to keep them busy with some school work and not to lose what was learned last year. They have both been good about doing pages in their workbook and Cianna is even keeping a writing journal where she writes about fun things she does. Peyton has made great progress as she now knows all her letter names and a handful of letter sounds. Cianna will be more than ready for second grade math. Placement testing is in a short 4 1/2 weeks so we'll know more then. Cianna has gotten to experience a bit of summer camp with fun field trips and we even did a day of gymnastics camp and is in a week of British soccer camp this week, which she loves. She has continued the gymnastics classes through the summer and they offered her a spot on the competition team again. She understands it more this year and is actually excited to try it out. They moved her up to a class with 7-11 year olds earlier this year (she is 6) and she is not only keeping up, but can do some things independently that the other girls need help with, especially the uneven bars. I think it will be great for her.

Diversity

Peyton is starting to notice differences between people, but her way of explaining it is quite humorous. The other day, we were at gymnastics waiting for Cianna's class to finish up. Peyton puts her arm next to mine and says "mom, we are the same. We match." Then she follows that with "Cianna and dad speak Spanish so they have dark skin." Since much of our audience around us was Hispanic, I tried to figure out the most PC way to answer this. Matt doesn't even speak Spanish, but I explained to her that Cianna speaks Spanish because she learned in Kindergarten, just like Peyton is going to. The dark skin she is referring to is from Cianna's fantastic tan from being outdoors most of the summer. Peyton's next response was "so when I learn Spanish in kindergarten I will have brown skin too?"