Bananagram Fun

I had another rough... let's call it day with Ella yesterday, and somehow righted the proverbial ship in the evening by asking her if she'd like to help me fix dinner.  I "needed" "help" cleaning and mashing the potatoes and pouring the baked beans -- her choice over lentils -- into the pot to heat up.  As she cleaned the potatoes, I poured myself a much-needed, much-deserved glass of wine and enjoyed it.  Honestly, despite still recovering from our... let's call it fight, I enjoyed that time with Ella, too.  It's not that it wasn't without its stresses (spilled cat food, potatoes flying everywhere while mashing, beans dripping from the serving spoon); but they were expected from an unskilled 4-year-old, and one who was eager to help and learn.  It also helped that we both had the right attitude, listening to and content with each other.

Anyway, we came up with some alternate seating arrangements for dinner.  With Legos pieces sorted by color in piles everywhere, our typical options for dinner tables were taken.  Instead, we decided she and Cal could eat at their little red table that we'd place alongside the kitchen island, where Dan and I would eat.  Ella then excitedly carried the red table and chairs into the kitchen on her own and proceeded to set our dinner places with plates, spoons and napkins.  Why just spoons, I'm not sure, but it didn't matter.

And then we ate.

After dinner, Dan had gotten back to Star Wars Lego set assembly duty, with Cal kind of participating.  I was on post-dinner kitchen duties, and Ella was running around.  Dan distracted her with the question, "Boopers (that's his name for her, short for Belly Boopers), do you know how to spell MIX?"  She scrambled to the pantry looking for something and after a bit of time scrambled back to Dan saying, "M-I-X" as she did.

Kitchen duty complete, I noticed that Ella had carried the yellow, banana-shaped bag of large Banagagrams into the family room, which is next to the kitchen. I asked her if she could spell MIX with the letters, and this led to an attempt to work on her sight words. I don't remember what I tried first, but I eventually got to the "AT" words -- there are so many, and I felt like I could get her to sound and reason them out.  We did AT, CAT, BAT, SAT, HAT, FAT... possibly more.

Eventually, it was bedtime; and I decided to end our Bananagram fun by finding and then laying out the letters:

(I really wish there were punctuation marks in these Bananagram sets.)

Anyway, Ella and Cal wanted to do their own... let's call them phrases.  Ella went first and assembled this:

(I love that she used a couple of the words that we worked on a few minutes earlier!)

And then this was Cal's gem:

(I'm still letting him sound things out when spelling and not worrying too much about misspellings; but I did tell him the correct way to spell RETURN after taking this picture.)

Their phrases made me genuinely laugh.  Leatherkids + Bananagrams are a fun combination!