Gymnastics

This week both girls had open lessons in their respective gymnastics classes. Of course we made sure to make lots of pictures, and both girls were very proud to show us what they can do. Especially Rachel! You should’ve seen her face – she was so happy she had her parents coming in to see her in class, she kept looking at us and smiling for an hour and a half non-stop. That’s something the kids who grew up with parents take for granted – what’s the big deal? It is a big deal for Rachel. She finally has her Mama and Papa cheering for her!



Victoria is helping her big sister with the bridge:




In other news Rachel’s made a lot of progress with multiplication tables. Even a month ago it was a hit or miss – she would get it right at about 50%. Now she’s more at 90% mark, and I’m very proud of her. She also started to understand the concept of division, so I think we are going in the right direction.


Victoria continues to improve her reading. Yesterday she read me a book about Spot the dog. She looked at the word “Spot” and told me: “Mama, if you read this word backwards, it will be Tops (this is the name of our local grocery store)” Then she looked at this word again and said: “If you swap “t” and “p”, it will be Stop!” Isn’t she one smart cookie?

Now that she started reading, she corrects my pronunciation more often :) Since I only started learning English at 29, I have a very thick Russian accent, and there is nothing I can do about it. Recently she corrected me when I pronounced the word “it” as “eat” or vice versa. I even consulted with my friend from work about pronouncing long and short “e”, but I still can’t get it right :)

In addition to English reading, Victoria started reading in Russian this week! Even though she knew Russian alphabet, I didn’t teach her to read in Russian on purpose – I wanted her to become a solid English reader first. But a couple of days ago she looked over her Grandma’s shoulder, who was reading Russian book at the time, pointed to one word and said: “Grandma, isn’t this such and such word?” It was a short 3-letter word, but she got it right! My Mom was speechless, and then she showed Victoria how to read in syllables. It’s very easy to read in Russian if you know the letters, it’s somewhat like Spanish: what you see is what you read. Of course, there are some rules, but most of the time, you just put the sounds together, and that’s it. By the time I got back from work, she was reading simple sentences! So now every evening we have a new ritual – both girls read to me in both languages!