My Mom sent this adorable puzzle in the same box she sent Josephine's Birthday presents in. Josephine helped me some, but I've done most of it... I've really enjoyed doing it, it's almost therapeutic! Josephine LOVES her new Barbie diamond castle princess doll and Tiara! Thank you Grandma and Grandpa Champion! She has played with it every day since she's got it!

Here's a picture of her spelling words from today. I wanted to show how well she's done learning how to write in cursive, almost on her own. I've quickly showed her a couple times how to form a few letters, and the rest she's just figured out by looking at other peoples' cursive writing! Just last week, we've formally started working on cursive together (she's practiced a lowercase "i" and "t" in her handwriting book).
Here's a much overdue picture of her CAT (California Achievement test) results. I've "painted" out our address and last name for safety reasons.... I was very proud of her!

Finally, Maureen's progress... She doing well with her preschool! Maureen, Josephine and I are all having fun with it. It's amazing how much Josephine wants to be involved when I'm teaching Maureen, she gets so excited to "help out." She's like my little teacher's helper :) Every week in her "Little Saints" preschool, we focus on the same topic/subject for the whole week. Two weeks ago it was letters, then last week was numbers, this past week has been farm animals and where our food/milk, ect. come from.

We're also on Lesson 9 in "teach your child to read in a 100 easy lessons." I repeated lesson 8 like three times, just to make sure she was retaining all the information! and We've done the first half of lesson 9 twice. She's doing really well, I'm just being careful not to move too fast, since she's so young. I'm in no hurry (like I was with Josephine!)... in retrospect, I should've taken my time and repeated lessons w/ her too. A lot of times I'll just copy information from the book onto our Fisher price "lite sketcher" to make it more fun for her. She knows the sounds of the following letters: short a, long e, t, r, s, and m. She's also read a couple 2 or three letter words, using those letters. We review throughout the day, too, when I think about it. Today at dinnertime, I sang "I have a secret letter, and it sounds SSSSSSS. Do you know what my secret letter is?" and then she whispers it in my ear... She gets a kick out of it every time! We went through all 6 letters today, doing it that way...