Madelyn has really surprised me with how much she is learning! She has known the alphabet for a long time and seemed interested in learning words because she was always asking me what signs and stuff said and how to spell things. So I figured the next step was for her to learn letter sounds and we picked up a LeapFrog Letter Factory movie that helped her to learn (and for me to relearn LOL)
About three days ago, I was doing Sudoku in the Sunday paper and she was looking at the comic strips. She usually walks around the house repeating letter sounds that are pretty random, so I didn't think anything of it when I heard her practicing her sounds. She ran up to me and said "Mommy! That word says "Yah-OOO-uh...YOU! And this word says "nnn-oooo, NO!" From there we picked up her books and started sounding out words. In just three days, she recognizes all the common words (the, an, is, has, etc), loves the punctuation marks (especially the exclamation point!!!), is learning about silent e's and what makes a vowel have a long sound or a short sound and is learning about combo sounds like "sh", "ch" and "th" along with sounding out lots of words! She is so excited about reading and I'm really trying very hard not to push it at all and let her lead the way. I'm still in shock that she is retaining so much and figuring it all out!
