I'm Sure There Was An Audible Click

We've officially been homeschooling now for right at a month. While some of it has been a breeze (Abby could practically teach math herself), other parts of it have required a bit more diligent effort. We had that first hurdle of the denial of N's existence in the alphabet, but most everything else has just been the daily work of learning completely new academic skills.

Take reading and phonics, for example. We've been playing around with letters and their sounds for a while now, but this is the first formal teaching Abby's ever had in the subject. She's been working hard, but the progress has been a bit slow going. Then last week, she started to get how the letters and their sounds work together to actually form words, and she was able to sound out simple three-letter words such as cat, hid, dot, and hug.

Then today, something just clicked. She would stare at her book for a few moments, and you could hear her slowly, methodically sounding out the words in front of her...

...and then poof! She could carefully, but accurately, read short sentences!!!

Granted, the sentences are something like "A cat sat on the log" or "Meg had mud in the milk" (which is my personal favorite...couldn't we choose something that actually makes sense?), but she was reading nonetheless and was obviously thrilled with her new skill!

Of course, we immediately grabbed the phone to call Josh...

...who hooted and hollered as loudly as he could without alerting his whole office to the fact that Abby could now read a whole sentence. Then he sent her a little note over e-mail (this is a running joke with our family and Josh's side of the family)...

Oh, what a joy to have this time with my daughter. I love homeschool!!