July update on reading and writing

Well, it's been a long time since I posted on here, but education has been continuing, mainly with our customised letter of the week and lately about the Olympics. Iona's reading is coming on, if not in leaps and bounds at least a little: she likes watching Alphablocks and has been enjoying reading Letterland books that we've been borrowing from our home education group. She is now able to read CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words with a little reminder of how to do it, although she currently enjoys messing around and being silly so much that she will often deliberately read it wrongly just for fun. The other day Daddy was so concerned that she wasn't reading as he thought she should (he was initially unsure about home education) that he bribed her with the promise of sweets if she read some words out to him, and surprise surprise she did fine!

It's been hard to think of activities to do with Iona to encourage her reading and writing, apart from reading to her, given her current awkwardness and attitude of "I do what I want to do!!". Today she was enjoying watching Abadas, when I had a brainwave: I wrote "fox", "bat" and "hippo" down one side of a piece of A4 paper and "Harry", "Ella" and "Seren", with hand-drawn cartoons, down the other. I then made sure that Iona knew what the different characters were and asked her to join them to the types of animals they were. She managed this with no help at all, showing that she was at least able to read "fox" and "bat" ("hippo" could have been guessed by being the last one done).

Iona has been slower to try writing, but lately has been writing some letters quite deliberately (as opposed to a few weeks ago noticing that shapes she had drawn looked like letters!). (Interestingly, considering how many children have trouble with p, b, d and q, one of the letters she has been writing correctly is "P".) At the end of last week she decided to make an Asda sign:

The 2 middle lines say "Asda" (AC) "is Open" (OP) and "Asda" (AC) "is" (I) "Closed" (C). I must say I was really impressed, as it was the first time she's actually attempted to write anything.

Iona's drawing is also coming on well, with her drawing a very realistic snail this morning.

Apparently the picture on the right is the snail coming out of its shell, while that on the left is where it's gone back into its shell. Unfortunately when I gave her my very impressed honest opinion she got quite cross with me for liking it!!