Old books, and more on those letters!

Before sleeping Ia has been reading these little books to herself in bed. Each story takes her a little over 5 minutes to read, maashAllah. These are old, old books, but the storylines are really sweet and I like the values of thrift, simplicity and hard work they express. In the book shown with the open page Hazel squirrel needs a new dress because her old one is too tight, but her mother is too busy to make one right away, so a friend helps her find a seamstress. In another story Hazel works hard all morning to earn enough for a small treat from the shop.
Apparently some children find reading classics (childrens' classics) hard because of the cultural differences and older style of language often found in those books; so I think it is helpful to encourage my children to read older works from a young age, to make sure they are used to various styles of writing.

U has been doing more non-colouring alphabet work today. In her Letterland handwriting book she had to trace and write the letters "C" and "O". After that I asked her to find all the Cs and Os from a tub of magnetic letters. Finally she sorted through a set of word/picture flashcards finding all words containing a C. There were 12 (she counted).