I took a bunch of video the other day of Anna practicing gymnastics at home.  I was testing out the HD video on my new, AWESOME Droid X.  I think it did a pretty good job.  This is the quality AFTER I converted from 3gp (the file type of the video on my phone) to mpg and then ran it through my video software to put it all together.  Not bad, eh?

I have more than just Anna updates, but I’ll save those for another post.

Anna’s reading has improved so much in the last couple of months.  It really amazes me how quickly she’s picking it up.  I have no idea what her “sight” word count is up to, but she knows a ton of sight words now (those are the words that she doesn’t have to sound out anymore…she knows them by “sight”).  She’s really good with words that have short vowel sounds (cat, hat, fish, hog, wash, etc..) and is doing really well with words that have the long vowel sound and a silent “e” at the end (rose, hike, kite, etc..).  She’s also remembering sounds that are a little more difficult like ea, ow, aw, ar, er, ir, etc.  It really amazes me.  She can figure out most words now, though there are a lot of those weird words that I have to help her with.  “Yes, ‘ow’ says ow like in ‘gown’ but it also says oh like in the word ‘show’.”  So confusing for young kids.  She’s getting it though.

She’s almost done with the first half of her online reading program, Headsprout.  I think she has 2 lessons left of the first 40 lessons.  We’re still unsure if we’re going to purchase the second half because I feel like she’s way ahead of the program at this point because she reads to us on a daily basis and also goes to other learning websites (Starfall.com is another good one).  We’ll see though.  She still really enjoys doing the lessons and asks to do her “alien game” (because the first few lessons involved aliens) on a daily basis.

I’ve also been having her do some activities out of a 1st grade reading/writing activity book that I picked up at Walmart or somewhere.  She can already do most of the first half of the book.  I’m enjoying sitting down with her and going through the activities.  She can pretty much write all the letters now, though there are some that still give her trouble (Z, e, g, q, z).  I have also started introducing her to basic addition concepts.  I took some macaroni noodles and dyed them a bunch of fun colors and we’ve practiced adding groups of noodles together: “2 red noodles and 3 blue noodles makes how many noodles?”  It’s fun for her and she’s learning at the same time.  And then when we’re done we put all the noodles back in the big tupperware container and she lets her little princess dolls swim in the noodle pool..  :-D

I’m really liking teaching her, which I guess makes it good that I’m still going for my teaching degree.  We’ve been tossing around the idea of homeschooling for awhile now and I’ve been researching more on that to see if that’s something I think we could (and should) do.  Anna can’t start Kindergarten here until Fall 2011 so I think we might try a trial run with homeschooling next year.  She’ll still do Pre-K preschool, but we’ll do some learning at home on a regular basis as well…….though that’s probably going to cause her to be ahead of a lot of the kids when she would actually start Kindergarten.  We’ll see though.

Here is Anna’s latest reading video.  This was a couple of days ago:

On to gymnastics…  Since my last update we decided to pull Anna from the really nice gym that she’s been taking classes from and put her in classes at the YMCA that we’re members of.  They have a decent gymnastics program and Anna has been in the free preschool classes for a couple of months now.  I talked to the gymnastics director about what is involved in the recreational and team programs to see whether they could get Anna in, because she definitely wasn’t being challenged in the preschool program.  The director had me bring Anna in and she had her do a few things and said that she’d like her to start on their Level 1 pre-team.  She decided that she would start up a new group of girls and has about 6-8 new girls starting with the Level 1 group and they’re all 4.5-5 years old, so I am very excited about that.

She’ll start that next Monday and it will be twice a week for 90 minutes each day, so 3 hours a week.  She’s going to love it.  The director told me that she is going to coach the group herself (her daughter will be in the group too and is only a month older than Anna…they’ve played together a couple of times) and wants to keep coaching them throughout their “career”, or whatever, at the Y.  She told me she’s going to try to have them ready to COMPETE Level 3 in the fall!  I don’t know if that’s possible, but it will be fun to see how she progresses now that she will be in the gym for so much longer.

I got an email from the director which made it seem so official.  She said each of the girls, now that they’re part of the team, get a cubby.  We’ll be contacted by that level rep who will let us know about the booster club and all that goes along with that.  It’s pretty exciting!  Anna doesn’t really get it at this point, just knows that she’s starting a new class next week at the Y.

Here are a couple of videos of Anna’s gymnastics.  The first was at home (obviously).  She got her pullover on the bar recently, and also her backwards roll.  The second video was today at Open Gym.  She didn’t have gymnastics or preschool this week (Spring Break) so we found a gym that looked like they had a fun open gym and tried it out today.  She had a blast.

The last Anna thing, which I almost forgot about but just saw the video that reminded me.  About a month ago, Dan’s brother, Steve, and his wife, Kathy, came for a visit and we went down to Mt. Hood, OR to ski for a couple of days.  Anna skied both days and did SO GOOD!  Before Anna was even born I was awaiting the day that I would be able to ski with her, so this was very exciting for me.  The first day we used the harness with Anna (like we did last year) and she did really good with it.  The next day I took her to the magic carpet beginner area and had her try it by herself.  She had the little thing on her ski tips so they would stay together but other than that she did it by herself!  She did so well there that I took her to the beginner chairlift and she did awesome coming down that slope.  We probably did that slope about 15 times.  We took a couple of runs down harder “green” runs and she did so good.  I probably had a smile plastered to my face the whole time.  It made my year watching her ski.  I’m not sure that we’ll be able to get out anymore this year which is a shame since she did so well.

Here’s a video of her skiing all by herself:

That’s all the Anna updates I have.  I have more non-Anna updates too but I’ll save those for another post.  I promise it won’t be 2 months from now the next time I post.  I PROMISE!

We found a good deal on a used gymnastics bar for Anna and couldn’t resist buying it.  She LOVES it.  Here she is today playing around on it.

About a month ago, I started an online reading program with Anna and she LOVES it.  It’s fun and more like a game to her, but she’s learning how to read while she’s “playing”.  It’s amazing.  There are 80 lessons total, and we’ve gone through the first 13 lessons and she has already read the first two “books” (they’re each 3 pages long, but they’re real books to her!) and is up to reading about 15-20 words.  I’m so proud of her and amazed at how quickly she’s taken to reading.  Here’s a little video from the other day.  Yes, I did have to bribe her to read the second page because we all know my lovely, stubborn daughter will never do any kind of showing off on demand.  :-p

Here are a couple of videos from Anna’s last gymnastics class here in TN.  She learned so much there and has improved SO MUCH in the 6 months she’s been there.  We’ll miss Ms. Tammy…it’s gonna be hard to find another coach as awesome as she is.  Here are the videos:

Here’s a video I got today of Anna doing more front flips on the trampoline.  She’s landing all the way around on her butt now.  She’s getting braver!

Caption from the video: In gymnastics this past week, Anna was taught how to do a little jump forward roll into the pit. Well, she decided to get on the trampoline and do the same thing with no prompting from me! (I promise!) She also did the closest thing to a backward roll that I’ve seen her do on a flat surface. She can sometimes do them down the incline mat at gymnastics, but she did a few really close ones on the trampoline! Anna is 3 years, 11 months in this video.

At Anna’s gymnastics class today I noticed that she wasn’t listening very well or doing what she was supposed to be doing.  It was the first time in awhile that there were more than 2 or 3 kids in her class…there were 5 today..so I don’t know if that’s the case or if she was getting a little bored.  In any case, she really didn’t listen very well at all which was very frustrating.  However, I did notice that she seem pretty far ahead of the other kids in her class.  The only time she needed help with anything was on her backwards roll down the incline mat and her instructor asked her several times to demonstrate something for the other kids, which was really cool.

Throughout the whole class I debated with myself on whether to ask her instructor if Anna could go ahead and move up to the Preschool 3 class.  I think they generally don’t move the kids until the end of the session, but the session just started (week 3 of an 8 week session) and this is our last one before we move, so I thought maybe they’d make an exception.  Plus, Anna does seem to be doing pretty well and I want her to continue to learn new things.  So at the end of the class I started to ask her instructor and before I could get the question out she told me to go ahead and bring her to the Preschool 3 class next week, that she watched Anna and she thinks Anna definitely needs to be moved up.  So YAY!  I didn’t even really have to ask.  The Preschool 3 class is the one I guess she would have skipped if she would have been able to start the pre-team at the beginning of next session.

Here’s a video of Anna doing handstands and cartwheels in the living room today.  They’re getting better.  The last cartwheel in the video is pretty good, I think!  :)

(Sorry about the poor video quality.  I recorded it with my Blackberry.)

Anna had her last gymnastics class in her Preschool 1 class this past Tuesday and will start Preschool 2 on Monday.  Here is some video of her class…it’s not terribly exciting, but I found it hilarious towards then end when the little girl who went before Anna on the higher bar dropped down off of it on her butt instead of her feet.  You can hear everyone laughing.

Anyway, here is the video from her class:

At the end of her class she got a medal for being promoted to the next class.  Her gymnastics school makes a big deal when anyone gets promoted and they stood Anna up on one of the balance beams and had everyone clap for her.  However, I think all the attention freaked her out a bit and she started crying and said she didn’t like the medal…but as soon as we were off the floor she wanted to wear it and didn’t take it off all night.  Here’s the video where she gets her medal.

Here’s a video from Anna’s t-ball game this past weekend. It was her 3rd game and the best so far. She ran every time (though one time she tried to run past 3rd to go to Grandma who was videoing) and did great hitting the ball. She even caught some balls (ok, well she ran after them and picked them up off the ground after they stopped rolling) and threw them to first base, but we didn’t get that on camera. I was very proud of her though.