Pa Pe Pi Po Puuuuuuut!

Did I mention that Sophia is going to a speech therapist?  She has a problem trilling her r's and she doesn't distinguish certain sounds very well.  We've decided to nip this in the bud now, because next year it could create major problems for her in school. One of the biggest problems will be spelling.  In the States we to spell by memorization (even if you sound it out, you still have to memorize if the word uses ea, ee, e consante e sound etc) whereas in Italian it is all phonetic-the word is spelled exactly as it is pronounced (which is why there aren't spelling bees here).  So if you can't hear or pronounce the words correctly, you will have a hard time spelling them.

Today Sophia was with Maria Grazia, who happens to be her favorite teacher and she feels very comfortable with her, perhaps too comfortable...One of the problems Sophia has, is distinguishing the P and the B sounds, so they played a game where MG wrote a B or P plus a vowel and Soph had to say a word that began with that sound ie P+A= PA and she said papà (dad), P+E=PE and she said pecora (goat) and then of course she started getting silly: P+I=PI and she said pipi (pee pee), and she got sillier: P+O=PO she said popo (poop), and finally P+U=PU and she squeezed her too little booty cheeks together and went PUUUUUUUUUT and said puzzetta (fart)!  Che vergogna (how embarrassing)!