I Love Reading!

Over the summer, the girls read a lot of books. Karis can read higher level books and I am always impressed with some of the words she can read. At her beginning of the year evaluation, she tested above average. We are so proud of her!  

As for Makena, it was a little rough over the summer. She got easily frustrated and struggled to remember her sight words. We realized she had a lot to learn about hard work. Well, fast forward to a couple months into Kindergarten and things are a lot different for her. 

When Makena entered Kindergarten, she was tested at level A (the lowest level). When her teacher tested her again at seven weeks, she moved up past level 1 and 2 and was scored at level 3! The goal for Kindergarteners is to be at Level 1. 

She loves to read, especially now that she has a lot of the basic words under her belt. She is always reading to Kyle or to her imaginary classroom in her bedroom. She'll tackle harder books and not get easily frustrated. She will even let Karis help her read books and Karis loves doing that. 

We're hoping Kyle becomes a good reader just like big sisters. Until then, the only one who will listen to his reading is the dog. 

A Glimpse of Our Summer with Videos

Karis has learned to swim! 

The kids didn't take any swim lessons this summer, but we have been swimming a lot with friends. Karis practiced swimming every time and now she can swim across the pool. 

Makena is reading!

Makena has been making great strides with her reading.

Kyle always makes us laugh!

Here is one example of how he does that.

Learning To Read

Karis has been learning lots of sight words in pre-K. She often points them out to me when she sees them in a book, on a sign or on random things around the house. But I wondered when she would start reading when her sight words were words like me, "go," "my," "he," "with",  and "I".

The other night, we were working on her homework. She had to find the word "has" on anything around the house. We scoured some books and found a few. When she started looking through the book "Are You My Mother?",  she realized she could read a lot of the words on the pages. She started reading, sometimes guessing the words with the help of the pictures and knowing what the first letter sounds like. To my surprise, she was reading a lot of the words! It was pretty exciting. She was thrilled that she was reading. Here is a video of her reading a couple pages. 

A Love For Reading

Karis loves to read books.  She will go through a whole bin of books and "read" each one, page by page.  If you catch her looking at one of her favorite books, you might even think she can read because she's got the pages memorized. 

The other night, she wasn't tired so I let her stay up to read books.  She was again going through her bin.  She had finished the books piled to her right and still had about ten more in the bin.  

I'm hoping Karis will learn to read soon because she definitely wants to... and maybe then Derek and I won't have to read the same books over and over again.  =)  She learned all her letters when she was about 26 months old.  Now she can tell you what letters certain words start with.  Or, if you give her a letter she can tell you what word starts with that letter.  It's a start!  

Here's a video of Karis.  She spelled her name several times on a different day.  But of course when I pull out the video camera she gets all mixed up and can't spell her name!

Makena likes to look at books as well, so hopefully she will learn to love to read books as well.