School Bus, Chapter books and Sight words!

The kids just keep growing and growing. I always thought that having a baby was so fun because there was constant development. New milestones to meet, new stages to go through. I've realized that they keep growing and there will continue to be new stages and ages. This fall I found out that Blaine was reading chapter books at school and that Aislin can read almost 100 words!

Blaine loves these books that his teacher introduced to him. They are the Magic Tree House books. His teacher emailed me earlier this year to let me know that his class had just completed some benchmark testing. They do it several times throughout the year. On the first reading test his teacher had told me that her goal was to have just half the class pass the test. She informed me that Blaine made a perfect score! That has never happened before, she told me. He did very well on the Language Arts and Math portion too. I am so proud of my little man!

Aislin's preschool has reading groups based on their levels. Her teachers make learning so fun for her. I don't push any academic type activities at home so I was surprised one day to find out just how much she had learned. Her teacher had sent a note home letting me know that she did very good reading a book aloud to her group at school. I decided that night to pull out some sight word cards to see how many she could read. You can see below where she put together a whole sentence! My babies are just growing so fast!

Finally, another new milestone...this fall Blaine began riding the bus! He was not interested in the least last school year. I think it has helped this year that our neighbor Ben and his sister ride the bus. Brent left me a voice message one morning at work to give him a call when I had a chance. When I called he told me that Blaine had decided to ride the bus that morning. Just like that, and now he is a bus rider! The picture below is actually from his second morning riding the bus. No matter how big they get I think I will always get excited over new achievements in their lives, from first teeth to first steps to first bus rides!