Kids' skills

Anselm is moving along with his reading. He can read anything, but not yet fluently; some fraction of individual words need to be sounded out. Happily, he is much less reluctant, and is reading to extract information from the environment. Yesterday evening, we discovered that he reads at least as quickly when the book is upside down as right side up! When he was tiny, when he looked through a book alone, it was inevitably upside down.. he never seemed to notice. I have read that this can have a connection with dyslexia, but at this stage I'm not too concerned about that. He's progressing just fine and has good handwriting.

Eliot's skill. When I got home today, one of the panels of the stained glass window was broken. Eliot came up and told me that she did it; she pushed on it and it cracked. When it became clear that this was a naughty thing to do, she changed her mind about the story. "Maybe the wind did it." Later, "Maybe a deer bumped into it with its chin." When Dad came home and heard about it, "Maybe someone else did it." After a while she felt that the stern conversation had gone on long enough. "Come on, Mum. Now be nice."

On the more positive side, her favorite game right now is first letters. "Florida starts with.. ff, fff, ff, 'F'!".