Today I want to appreciate the constant chatter.

Some days the non-stop chatter of my house drives me nuts. Today I'm appreciating it. So much of learning comes not with the planned schoolwork but with the discussions that happen.

Today I'm appreciating that when my seven year old was doing his typing practice he puzzled over why, just a handful of letters into a new exercise, he was listed as having 60% accuracy, when on all the previous exercises he had over 90% accuracy. The question led to discussion about how 2 out of 9 is so much more than 2 out of 23. The discussion could go from math to social skills as we talked about how experiences add together so that a bad experience can become a smaller and smaller part of the whole.

Today I'm appreciating my four year old interrupting his reading to talk about the pictures. I'm appreciating how much of the books I miss, with my eyes focused on the squiggly letters and only glancing quickly over the pictures. I'm appreciating how we can end up talking about how the story sets up expectations of what type of bat is being mentioned by keeping the picture of the bat until the next page, when we can be surprised to see it isn't what we thought. We can talk also about the letters in the words and I begin to see words differently. For example, I always thought the name "George" was spelled weird, until I sit dissecting it with my child and really notice that it is just two "ge" (with the "e" to show the "G" is soft) and "or" in the middle.

I appreciate my two year old trying her best to talk to me. The little echoes she makes repeating back words she's just heard and her instructions. Her favorite words these days are sit, stop, read and dog.