Literacy

Today was my third session with my literacy student at GiGi's Playhouse. My student, "K", is a sixteen year young, beautiful girl who yes, rocks an extra chromosome and in the first session I had with her, I knew she had more to offer me than I had to offer her. I feel so blessed to have this opportunity and to have her as my student. Truthfully however, K and her mother are really the one's who are doing the teaching and I am grateful for that as well!

Anyway...

Shortly before I began teaching literacy to K, I put a "lesson plan" together that would hopefully get us through the eight week course. Last week I really worked K with a life-like lesson so this week I decided to give her a break and really bring something fun to the table. Beans.

I decided to test this lesson out on Jasmine and Kiliegh. I wanted to see if they would think it was an interesting activity and I was hoping that in the end, they would also find it a fun lesson as well!

The "magical" beans (aka Mexican Jumping Beans) were slow to start jumping but once they began the girls had a blast with them. I went over my lesson plan and asked the same questions from them that I would from K and once the girls realized that the beans had a living "creature" inside they almost took to them like they would a new pet! Needless to say, I was reassured that this was a good idea and the girls spent the next hour racing their beans.

Speaking of literacy...,

I finally finished Vada's first literacy book! As wonderful as this idea is, I can not claim it as my own, not entirety anyway. I tweaked it to my liking but took it from some other amazing mothers who, like me, believes there is no such thing as "too soon" when it comes to education and our children.

The first step was buying the board books. The one below, First Words, is the first completed set that I have made for Vada. However, I have purchased two other books by Bright Baby, First Colors and First Animals, which will eventually be turned into a learning set as First Words has been.

I took the matching concept one step further by making word only duplicates to match with. My hopes are that these books will last through a whole lot of learning lessons for Vada.

So far, Vada digs the books and she is really getting the idea of what I am asking her to do.

She makes me proud. 

Very proud.

  Like most people that I know, Vada enjoys being successful and our cheers seems to only motivate her even more and her determination motivate me. So, we do a lot of cheering and celebrating in this house. 

We do a lot of singing songs of praises, silly dances and high fives too!