I refused to allow the kids on the computer Saturday morning so they roped me into playing Legos with them. Quite an experience.
Mario created flying men who could wield a giant axe mid-air to cut off peoples’ heads. Lovely.
Maria created a trailer to carry horses and several townspeople to Texas. (Non-sarcastic) lovely.
Maria and I were finally able to get Mario to calm his violent men down and hop on the trailer. Then she surprised him and made the trailer fly! Mario was impressed.
He follows her lead more than he will ever admit. For example, she created a “blender” on her trailer for the people to make smoothies. Within two minutes, he was building a similar blender and explaining how people can make smoothies. Ri looked at me and smiled. She knows her influence.
After an hour or so, they begged to play Minecraft for a few minutes. I agreed only if Mario read a Baggie book to us.
Mario whined a bit but then gave in to the pressure and sat next to Ri and read. He is doing so well with sounding out his words. He does really good looking at the pictures to figure out the words, too. Sweet story about that: in one of Mario’s books, there was a picture of a dog running with his owner everywhere. A boy asks “can I take your dog on a walk?” A girl responds “No, take the dog for a run!” She looks angry in the picture even though it’s clear that is not the intent. When Mario read that last sentence, he read it angrily. I asked him why he used that tone. He responded “look how angry that girl looks – that is how she would talk.” Very analytical thinking out of that boy.
He was close to finishing his baggy book when he hit a hard word: “skipping”. He tried a few attempts when Ri stepped in and gave a hint.
“How does “sk” sound?”
Mario couldn’t quite get it.
“What do you do with rocks at the river?”
“Skip!”
“Good job buddy! Now what does “ing” sound like?”
“Oh, skipping!”
God, I love seeing those exchanges! How darling. Makes my heart flip-flip.