It’s exciting to watch my 5 year old daughter pick up early reading and writing skills in Kindergarten.

Right now they’re focusing on the letter “A”. How you write it. What it sounds like. What words begin with “A”.

One of the interesting writing exercises they do is called Rainbow Writing. To do Rainbow Writing, the child will trace over a letter that the teacher wrote in marker beforehand, or that’s on a ditto. The kid will trace over the letter 5 different times, using 5 different colored crayons. It gives the letter a colorful rainbow effect, thus making the repetition less tedious.

My daughter’s homework this week was to do Rainbow writing over a capital and lowercase letter A that the teacher wrote in a notebook for her. (Below is my daughter’s homework from last night – I enhanced the colors on the computer so you could see what I mean.)

The other homework my daughter had this week was called the Letter Aa Mystery Bag. She had to find something that begins with the letter A. Then she had to put it in a brown paper bag labeled with an A. Then she had to come up with 3 clues to help the class guess what was in the bag. I wrote the 3 clues down for her and she put the list of clues in the bag. Today the class will figure out together what’s in the bag. (She put a toy ant in her bag. Yuck!)

I thought that was a smart game to make learning fun.

Lastly, my daughter told me yesterday about how she learned about the exciting mark and with her hand in the air she drew an exclamation point! I thought that was a very clever way to explain an exclamation point to a young kid, calling it an exciting or excitement mark!

I’m excited to see what she learns next!