Alice learning to read at school

Alice's school had a special morning for parents to come in and watch their kids work.  So Zac took a couple hours off work in the morning, and stayed at daycare to learn about what Alice does all day. It is kind of neat because you can see the Montessori methods for teaching kids to read that are used at her school.

In case it's hard to tell, but they have a big case with drawers and each drawer has a letter and then a bunch of objects that start with that letter. The children take a drawer to their work rug and they have apparently been trained to make a little song for each object, saying the name and then emphasizing the sound.

In this other work, it appears that there is a box of letters, and the kids have a picture with the word printed below. Then they have to make the work with the letters from the box.  It's pretty cool, really.