Christopher started his lesson today doing Quick Drill in Reverse. He practiced all the vowel sounds with their keywords. Christopher practiced g, sh, f, ch, z, and wh. He practiced the welded sounds ing, ind, olt, ost, ive, and all. Christopher created open vowel words using the magnetic tiles. He built the words: pro, she, and sky. Christopher remembered to use the "sh" digraph tile for the word "she." Christopher continued to build words: pregame, restate, retold, preplan, and cohost. On these words, Christopher was asked to separate the words into syllables. He was able to do this successfully, seeing that the prefixes such as pre, re, and co make a syllable that stands alone. Christopher practiced the sight words: thought, brought, four, before, and different. He needed extra review to write the word, "different." Christopher practiced spelling the words: brazen and crusade using the syllable cards. We spent a few minutes looking up the meaning and the history of the first Crusades. Christopher looked at digital pictures of famous paintings showing the Crusades of the Middle Ages. Christopher did not hear about this before, but I further explained to him how the crusades were wars waged by Christians and Muslims for control of the Holy Land. Christopher then began his dictation. He is working on understanding and remembering how to represent the long sound of the vowels. I am showing Christopher the right markups on the whiteboard when he gets stuck. Christopher succesfully completed five real words, five nonsense words, five sight words, and three sentences. We will analyze the sentences next week. For the balance of the class, we read from the book Because of Winn Dixie. Christopher did some of the reading aloud. He showed very fluent reading with excellent expression.