Even though Miranda learned to read earlier than Eleanor, and she’s generally better at spelling, Eleanor is better at unscrambling words. These are the puzzles where the letters in a word have been mixed up and you need to decode what the original word is.

An example of a scrambled word I gave both of them is “KROF”. Eleanor instantly wrote down “fork”. Miranda got frustrated, and kept on saying, “Frok? Frok? What’s frok??”

They both remain interested in doing these kinds of games though. I like it because I think it encourages learning how to spell words. Both Miranda and Eleanor have been scrambling words for me to unscramble. It gets tricky when they have missing or wrong letters, but it’s usually easy enough to tell what they originally picked.

As is often the case in the evenings, Eleanor and Miranda started drawing the moment they got home from school. After working on their drawings for a bit, they showed us what they made.

Miranda drew this one.

She had asked me how to spell several of the words, but the phrasing is all hers: “I want to be a firefighter because so I could help people when they are on fire”.

Eleanor drew this picture.

Eleanor wrote: “I am a artist. I paint in a museum”. She also labeled (and misspelled) “paint brush” because she said that she didn’t want people to think it was a carrot.

Eleanor’s been talking about being an artist recently, though she has also said that she wants to be a scientist so she can go into outer space.

I don’t know where this fascination with firefighting came from with Miranda though. This was the first we had heard of it.

We posted the photos for December 2009. There’s just three more months of pictures to catch up on now.