Phonics

First of all I'd like to say that the spelling of phonics is ridiculous. The whole point is to sound out words by how they are spelled and if that were the case then it should be spelled fonics. Anyway, regardless of that we did some phonics work this evening. I pulled out a new book to work with. We worked on the letters B, C, D, P & T. I would point out what letter we were going to work on and then Alex would interrupt me to point out every B (C,D,P or T) on the page. She can't look at any random letter (except A & X) and tell you what it is, but when you show it to her she can find all the rest of them. So, on with the work... we said the letter, the sound it makes and a few words that start with that sound. Then we would look at pictures and name the object and decide if it started with that letter. She answered correctly for several objects and I thought he was brilliant until I realized she was saying no to everything. We just talked through it and did it together.
Emma wanted me to do work with her too, that is the hardest part. It is hard to do 2 things at once. So she colored while Alex & I worked and then we put the books up and played with big Legos. Alex built the tallest tower that she could and Emma and I worked on spatial descriptions. On top, under, beside, in, out, full, empty. Those were things she had trouble with on her speech eval this week. She liked 'under' the best because she got to put blocks under the bucket. For some reason they both thought that was fun.
About 6 we went to the bedroom to wind down because everybody was grumpy. We did flash cards for a while. I had to pull Emma's thumb out of her mouth to get her to talk, but she did participate. I tried to cater the cards to things Emma needs to work on. So, with the doggy card she had to point out all of its body parts. Things like that. Alex had a fun answer tonight. The flash card was an apple and I asked her, "How does an apply taste?" I expected the usual answer of, "Good." But instead she said, "Sweet." I was so proud that she was using a different adjective. I know that Heidi works on that in speech.
Alex is still doing awesome with her colors, Emma's answer for everything is still yellow. Emma doesn't always understand the difference between "What shape is this?" and "What color is this?" I guess that could be because so many teaching tools put the two together. I'll try to make a point to teach them separately.