I thought this was a cute picture of Maureen, even though her hair is a bit messy!

I wanted to talk about Maureen's progress in reading... As with Josephine, I've made my way slowly through "teach your child to read in a 100 easy lessons"... we're on lesson 27 now. It'll probably take another year and a half to finish the book at this rate, but she'll be reading really well by that point. I've supplemented with other reading/phonics materials more with Maureen to try and make it more fun... using puzzles (from trend enterprises) and games (from Hooked on Phonics). She really looks forward to her schoolwork and enjoys doing it...Most recently, I bought "BOB" books, which are like short, mini easy readers, for very beginning readers. I found that even traditional "level 1" easy readers were too hard for early beginners (even for Josephine at the same age... it wasn't until we were around lesson 40+ that she was able to start reading level 1 easy readers, and even then, they felt long for her, and me!). When they came in the mail (ordered from amazon.com - they're $6.00 cheaper than the local bookstore and we had free S&H!) I let Maureen pick one of the books, and she read it THREE times in one day, AND wanted to read it more! Yesterday and today, she picked two different books, and made it through most of the way (before getting distracted). In any case, I was VERY impressed and happy that she did so well and was so enthusiastic about reading her new books. I posted a link at the left if you want to see images of "BOB" books.

Speaking of school... Michael will be done after 5:00PM on Monday - Hooray!!!!
Also, next week is Josephine's last week of learning new material...the following week she'll have a few tests, but that's it. Exciting times!

Thank goodness we have a cat who is very tolerable of children (up to a certain point, though). I caught them "decorating" Inky with their pretend jewelry. As you can see, they were having a lot of fun doing it. I just had to take a picture... I rescued the poor cat, of course, afterwards.