Week 4, Block 5
We’ve been singing again. Actually, Puggle’s been singing almost all the time. And he’s rather into improvisation at the moment. He’ll begin with one song, mix it up with another, and then head off somewhere completely unknown. At some length!

He’s continuing to notice letters, and is pretty good about recognising most of the ones we’ve done so far. He’s had a couple of days where he’ll say a sound and then list all the words he can think of that begin with that sound—pretty much all the ones he begins with are ones we’ve ‘taught’ him (from alphabet books or the like), but he’s starting to add his own. He’s also beginning to come across words (mostly concrete nouns) and then exclaim excitedly and tell us what they start with. Up until this week, he’s mostly done that for one sound that we’ve been doing recently, but this week he’s begun to do one letter, exhaust the possibilities, then move onto the next letter. He spent about twenty minutes on this after dinner the other night. He does still get caught out, but it’s mostly things like ‘r’. He still pronounces it ‘w’, so water and rooster both start with the same sound:-)

This week, he’s also begun discovering rhyme. He obviously doesn’t have a clear idea of what it is yet. “Mama, ‘dark’ and ‘yellow’ rhyme!” But he does often get it right (sometimes thanks to Dr Seuss:-) ), or not quite right (still/ball). He’s very clearly narrowing down the explanation:-)

He’s been doing a lot of craft:-) Lots of punching out shapes, and gluing and cutting and sticky taping. For today’s birthday party, he made a placemat for the present (I’m planning a separate post about the placemats). He has his own scissors, and loves to cut things (mostly paper, but this week he’s also been ‘pruning’). This week though, I’ve got down the fancy scissors. He decided that he wanted me to use them on the gift placemat, but he spent a lot of time cutting up other paper using them—then he stuck the pieces together to make a doll’s house:-) He even managed to glue some of the leaves he pruned to a piece of paper!

Altogether, it’s been a fairly productive week… Once again though, not really with all the reading I’d planned. Need to work on that next block. I’ve been able to switch swimming around, so I’m hoping that lets me get more of a handle on getting started!