That's great - my DD went through a knock-knock phase followed by a fascination with puns and homonyms/double entendres.

It was kind of painful and cute at the same time to watch her experimenting with what works and what doesn't. The glee followed by the crestfallen look when she realised that she hadn't quite nailed it yet and the 'joke' had fallen flat was wierdly priceless.

My DS6 made it into the USCF Top 100 players age 7 and under! He is currently #82, but this ranking is based on his USCF rating from last month. His rating has since gone up significantly (like 100 points), so he will probably remain on the list and go up in ranking next month.

Dd4 is reading! Yay! Dd has been surprising us with her math and science reasoning abilities for a long time now but never showed any interest in reading. We read a lot to her but other than that have not used any method to teach her to read. I was thinking of starting to formally teach her to read but wanted to know what she knows. So 2 weeks ago, I tried to see if she can read. I wrote 10 long sentences (7-12 word sentences) with a mix of sight and phonetic words ( words like kind, beautiful, like, crayons, etc) and she read them all. She seems to know most of her sight words, guessed some of words based on context and phonetically read and in some cases corrected based on context. She was not extremely slow either. Would you guys consider this reading? She still has no interest in reading books or reading spontaneously but I am not going to force her. I think she will get there soon enough.

At the beginning stages of reading both my boys enjoyed writing over reading...they enjoyed drawing pictures (or having me draw pictures for them to color...they told me what to draw) and then they labeled or captioned by themselves or dictated to me...nobody said boo if they spelled something wrong but if they asked for a spelling I always gave it to them (that is my version of inventive spelling). They loved stapling these books together and then reading them over and over.

The other thing they liked a lot were these readers called we both read where the adult or older sibling reads the left side and the new reader only reads the right side. Later my kids would just read both sides without me.

http://www.webothread.com/server/TreasureBay/website/main/scripts/default.asp

TorsMama, that is super cool! There is a boy from our town on that list as well. Is he going to the championships in Orlando? (We are not.)

DD5 learned long division this morning in about a minute and a half. she was actually predicting what we should do next as i started to show her - i think she did more of the teaching than i did. wheee / hold me, i'm scared.

((Hugs!))

Thanks! His current rating is 1192; his goal was to be at 1000 by the time he turned seven. He just turned 6.5 end of Oct. so he blew that goal out of the water. no, we just do local stuff; I have two other kids younger than he and about to have a fourth baby. So not much traveling. We will go to k-12 nationals in the Dallas area in the spring though, that is only 2 hrs from us.

DS's chess club coach has been trying to get us to take him to Orlando, but I can't quite see spending money on this at this stage. (It is driveable for us, but hotel, etc.) Is your son in a school club, and are you experiencing any pressure from others to push him to compete more?

No, he is homeschooled. He and my DH started a local chess club this year that he participates in. It's mostly adults but as he likes interacting with adults this is ok. He plays in usually two local tournaments a month (one k-12 and one adult). He took a few lessons way back when he was four from a local master and the coach really wanted him to continue but we just couldn't afford it.