Enchanted

This evening, Anselm recounted some chants that Ms Luke does with them to learn the spelling of their "sight words"-- lately, a/the/I/my/see. She's quite amazing with her chants. She is a tall, willowy, beautiful, softly spoken blonde, and when we visited with the school tour last year, she was leading her class in a rap chant: "The heart is for PUMPING, for pumping, for pumping-- the heart is for PUMPING, for pumping, the blood", etc. (Clearly it stuck in my mind.) Similarly with their names in the first week, and now their spelling. It works! Anselm is very comfortable spelling all of his words, and when I tried him on "this" and "that" this evening, he taught me how to turn it into one of their classroom chants, which we practised. Very cool.

The kids have writing time 3 days a week where they freely write and illustrate. He's been writing titles to some classically Anselmesque diagrams. Examples since the start of school:

JRMS (germs)
SMrF HLS (Smurf hills)
U SRF VLIZ (A Smurf village)
RANBO EKSPOZEN (rainbow explosion)
TorNADO (tornado!)