B and I finished reading Wintersmith tonight. She was very pleased that we have finally gotten through the book, and is already plotting our next read-aloud. Having gone to see The Golden Compass with her riding camp last week and fallen violently in love with the whole universe of His Dark Materials, if we can borrow a copy of Northern Lights relatively soon I suspect it will be the next candidate…

Her own reading appears to have gone backwards slightly, probably because she has been spending so much time riding or playing in the garden, and far less time on the computer. We will be targeting comprehension strategies this year, methinks. Although her decoding skills are certainly coming along – she’s finally having fun playing with the Magnetic Poetry words on the fridge, which you absolutely cannot do if you rely too heavily on context to work out words! She’s been putting a long string of words together at random then reading the resulting “poem” 🙂

This morning the topic of the temples at Angkor Wat came up, and I did an image search for her so she could see what I was talking about. Another “hook” for her knowledge of the world to build on.

What else? She’s going on the bus with E tomorrow morning and spending the day at Caitlin’s house. I will continue to remind myself that she has to be allowed as much freedom as possible to continue her own life and interests, and that she isn’t my built-in babysitter by virtue of a mere accident of chronology… and I will also be exasperated by having to wrangle K and H entirely without her assistance yet again. I think that is perfectly justified, really…