Mini Review: Reading Raven

Reading Raven: A Mini-Review

I purchased Reading Raven for my children and we all love it. It is reasonably priced at $3.99.

This app does a great job at teaching early reading and writing from a phonics perspective. The game is divided into five lessons each with its own theme. The games within each lesson are similar, but changing the theme freshens them up considerably as the child levels up. The mini-games within each lesson teach letter-sound correspondences, sight words, sounding out words, spelling, and even writing. Sections of the game allow children to record their own voice reading and then compare the word they read to the one the narrator reads to see if they get it right. Other sections help them trace individual letters in a word and then the program shows them the completed word in their own handwriting. Every few mini-games they earn a sticker that they use to decorate Reading Raven's treehouse and my son enjoys that as well.

I feel it was a $3.99 very well spent.

Passports

Our family will be going on our first real vacation later this year. We travel regularly to visit family, but that isn't quite the same thing as a vacation to an exotic locale. This vacation will be particularly special because it will involve extended family. My parents are going, several aunts are going, and a good family friend is going as well. I'm am looking forward to it more than I can say given that I will be traveling with a three and (by then) five year old.

Now, to take this trip, it is advised that we have passports. It is not, strictly speaking, necessary - but it is advised. I'd rather not have to drag several personal documents for four different people along, so we decided to go with the passport option.

As it turns out, the application is the least of the hassle. You have to locate and gather birth certificates, copies of the fronts and backs of drivers licences, marriage licences, and more. You have to drag all of those things to a place that processes passport applications and pay them an exorbitant amount of money.

And then, as icing on the cake, you have to persuade your preschool age children to sit for passport photos. If you can't get that photo, all the rest of the preparation is useless!! Michael's behavior was fine. It was the fact that the very patient lady had to take five pictures before he would keep his shoulders down and not smile so broadly that his eyes squinched up that was frustrating. Apparently hunched shoulders and squinty eyes are passport picture no-nos.

Ava on the other hand was in a mood. She behaved beautifully for her first picture. Unfortunately that one was discarded for squinty-eye syndrome. Several minutes of pleading got a second attempt which was discarded due to hunched shoulders. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get the sulking child to look at the camera for a third attempt. The passport lady chose the hunchy shoulders as the picture least likely to get rejected by the all powerful ones at the passport office and we just had to go with that. Lovely.

As a bonus for the wildly successful outing, my passport picture (mine needed to be renewed) looks a lot like those arrest pictures they always show of criminals in news articles. Isn't that great?

The Weekly Review: Week 79

SLP Resource of the Week

Organizing materials is a huge pain. I think Jackie at Teal and Lime has come up with a perfect, compact way of organizing card decks. She uses index card holders in a tray. Click on the link and take a look. It is adorable. If you're using full-size, commercial decks, you'd fit one deck per index card holder. If you're using my free decks, you could probably fit all the decks that go with a particular phoneme in a single index card container. I would probably take the step of labeling the top of each index card holder with the phoneme of the cards inside so I could grab the one I want in an instant.

Ava this Week

I believe I've already mentioned pneumonia 2.0. What impressed me most about my little girl this week is how she just doesn't let much get her down. Even through five straight days of 102.5ish fever she still woke up at her usual time, played (in a low-key manner), and was relatively cheerful. She was handling it so well we didn't even give her a fever reducer most of the time. I need to keep her fortitude in mind the next time I'm trying to decide if she's "sick enough" to make a pediatrician appointment.

Weekly Michael

Michael: "Mama, there's a girl at school and Guess What?!?, she wants to marry me."
Me (thinking-not saying): You've got to be kidding me! It's preschool!
Me: "That's nice sweetheart. Maybe when you're grown up. What's her name?"
Michael: "I don't know."

Weekly Weight Loss

This week I'm down 3.2 pounds. That's exactly the same as last week. Everyone's got a unique set of genetic, dietary, medical history, exercise patterns, etc, but here's the evidence for me. I used a strict calorie-in/calorie-out method of dieting for 11 weeks and lost 9.5 pounds (0.86/week). Then I eliminated carbs from my diet. I eat as much as I'm hungry for, as long as it isn't carbs. (Ok, there are a few here and there in veggies, but not much.) I've been eating low carbs for 2.5 weeks and I've lost 7.9 pounds (3.16/week). That's a pretty dramatic difference. For whatever reason, drastically reducing carbs in my diet works really well for me.

Weekly All Consuming Obsession

I have been working every spare minute on getting the books ready for opening the store next week. My mother generously offered to watch the kids a little bit a lot of extra time and my husband is helping out with some of a lot of the technical coding. The pieces are coming together. My proofreaders were amazing. It looks like the store will go up sometime next week and will have two books available at opening: /s/ and /s/-Blends. Once I take a break, I'll be working on adding more books regularly. (One a month or perhaps one every two months? These things take a lot of time to put together.)