Isabella mure asevis

 A rare princess sighting

 Oh, ok, that's more like it, a fierce dino princess!!

 Father's Day

 Silly girl finding a new favorite activity - the sprinkler!

 It is kind of rare that she lets me take her picture, unless she is trying to be silly. Then she immediately wants to see the picture. After seeing some of these she said "ewwww, grossss!"

This picture is "our Annie when she was little"

Wow, where do I even begin with this kid? What are some of the first words that come to my mind when thinking of Isabella?

• smart
• silly
• fun
• loving
• active
• curious (that is a euphemism for "asks WHY all the time")
• very much 3 (has her mood swings, her moments of extreme independence and extreme dependence)
• reader
• storyteller
• entertainer (on her own terms)
• dependable
• rhymer

As a teacher, and a teacher with a lot of experience teaching kids how to read, I am extremely proud of how her reading skills are developing. She knows the sounds for almost all of the letters and can tell you what letter a word starts with (t-t-t-t-table starts with t). She also knows quite a few sight words, but she surprises me when she sounds out words - so proud of my girl for developing phonics knowledge! One time she told me to write c - o - p on a piece of paper. She is always randomly stringing letters together so I could tell this wasn't a word that she knew. I asked her what word it was and while she kind of struggled with the vowel sound, the word she said was more or less "cowp". I was so excited! Her most recent favorite literacy skill is rhyming. She is constantly announcing to me that two words rhyme. Sometimes it is in relation to something, like she hears it in a song or a book, but sometimes it is out of the blue. Sometimes it is two real words, sometimes she just switches out that initial consonant sound to rhyme with a nonsense word "Mommy, driving and piving rhyme".

Tonight she was doing her "email" on the computer and she typed "Isabella mure asevis" She knows how to spell her first name but her middle (Marie) and last were completely sounded out, and they are very phonetic! I was bowled over!

--Side note-- I started this post a couple weeks ago thinking I would come back to it and keep adding on but now that I'm reading it, it already is starting to sound out of date, so I'll just publish it and do a new one later. The last paragraph about her writing her name was tonight but the rest of the post is a couple weeks old.