Very First Letter

It's amazing how much Clara has learned in just the first 6 weeks of grade 1. During the last two weeks, Clara's first school holidays, it seems that everything she has learned so far has had time to really settle and sink in. We've been so happy to see Clara try to read letters everywhere, find "hot words" that she knows already, and spell out words. She's even started trying to write.

Here's Clara's very first letter:

She got zero help with it, in fact, we weren't allowed to look until it was all finished. The spelling is very... creative. We have been told by Clara's teachers to never criticize or even correct any spelling mistakes in the first year. Any attempt at writing is awesome and they are mostly concerned with learning the sound values for letters in the beginning, and trying to get the kids to understand the process of putting speech into writing. Only towards the second year they actually try to train "correct" spelling.

Here's what she wrote:

FN CLARA
FÜ OMA
LB OMA
ES MC DS .

Get it?! =)
Most of the vowels are missing, because Clara is still pronouncing letters like "buh" and hears the vowel sound after the B sound. So this is what she meant to spell and what it means:

VON CLARA
FÜR OMA
LIEBE OMA
ICH MAG DICH.

From Clara
For Oma
Dear Oma
I like you.

The soft "ch" sounds all just got spelled as "S" because Clara hasn't learned the conventions for spelling "ch", "sch", and "sh". And "mag" got spelled as "MC", because German final consonants are devoiced, so even though we spell "g", it sounds actually like a "c/k" sound, which she knows from her own name as "C". So logical and awesome.

Clara has also started reading books to Oscar - mostly just telling the stories not reading the words, but both kids also "read" books from memory, which Clara's teacher Jen has said is also a great precursor to real reading.

And of course we're having playground fun whenever the weather allows it!