A New Semester

Hannah has now completed her first semester of kindergarten. Didn't she just get on the bus for the first time? Time sure is flying by!

She got another report card, and again she did well. She got all 3s and 4s (basically equivalent to A/Bs and A+s) except there was some issue with not knowing the title page of a book, so she got a 2 (B/C) for that one. Either way, she has made fantastic progress, bumping up many of her 3s from last quarter to 4s and bumping her 1 and 2 from last quarter to 4s as well. We are so proud of her for always trying her best and working to complete new challenges!

Speaking of new challenges, Hannah's reading is really coming along now. She went from sounding out a few words in August to actually being able to read me entire books without much problem. She even walked in and read me a note from her teacher last week with a fluency that I didn't know she had. I would have assumed that her teacher had just read the note to her first and that was why she was able to easily read words I didn't even know she really knew how to read, but it was actually a thank you card for the Christmas gift we gave her teacher and it was sealed. Amazing does not even begin to describe how I feel about this progress. According to her teacher, she is reading at a 1st grade level.

A great deal of her reading success comes from memorizing sight words now, since she had phonics pretty much down when entering school. As of middle of December, Hannah had memorized the entire kindergarten sight word list (66 words). Her teacher was swamped with testing so finally just got around giving her the first set of 1st grade words this week. When I showed the 12 new words to Hannah this morning, she ran down the entire list on the first try, only struggling a tiny bit on 2 of the words. I forsee bigger books in our future!

We are so proud of our smart, sweet girl!