Writer’s World

Selena chose her favorite stuffed toy to write about this week. We took a picture of him and I printed it off. She then began to dictate her story to me.

Hoppy By Selena

Hoppy lives in the picture by himself.

He likes to sit down with the placemats.

He loves home.

He is so nice.

He loves me.

Then Hoppy says, “He loves new things.”

Hoppy smells good by his feet.

Hoppy sleeps with me every night.

Hoppy has been with me for ages ago.

I will keep Hoppy forever.

The End.

Just a little history behind Hoppy. He is the first stuffed animal that Selena’s mommy bought her for her first Easter. Selena has never been without Hoppy. She takes him everywhere she goes, but he must stay in the car. There is only a few places that he is allowed to go in with her. She does not go to bed at night without him, not for naps, nor bedtime. She sucks her thumb while holding the silky part of his feet under her nose. She truly has a very special relationship with Hoppy. I am sure she will look back on him even after the time comes that she doesn’t pack him around all the time, as a very special friend, and part of her life.

Writer’s World

I thought we would have a week totally without any sort of schooling, but when Selena discovered the picture I took of her napping, she had to add it to her notebook and write a story about it.

Selena Sleeping By Selena

Selena sleeps in bed.

Selena Sleeps with a pillow, blanket and hoppy.

She sleeps while sucking her thumb.

Selena woke up.

When I woke up I came out of my room.

I was so tired because I played at the park.

I played on the swing and the slide.

I even went up the big ladder and down the big slide by myself.

The End

Yes, I got her to write more today. With just a few questions and a little prompting I got her to allow me to turn the page so we could fill the back as well. I will admit as we neared the end though, Selena was getting a little anxious for the story to end. She kept going though since she wanted to fill the entire page. Sometimes it is just good to go with the flow and to allow our children to tell us what they want to do. I knew she was going to ask to write a story since she has been packing her notebook around  now the last couple of days reading every story she has wrote. We were just waiting until she found the right picture, or knew just what she wanted to write about.

Learning to Write

Selena has discovered that she indeed can write more then she thought she could. We have been building a lot of letters and numbers with our arrows that I made for her. If you missed that post you can find it here. Sure there are letters that she gets a little confused over like S and Z but she is able to correct her mistake with no frustration nor prompts from me. It truly warmed my heart when she wrote her name in my Mother’s Day card. This dry erase board book has become one of her all time favorite learning toy she has. She will sit down throughout the day and practice her letters and numbers. She writes on all the white boards at the church, and any piece of paper that she finds here at home. We have noticed that as she is becoming more aware of a writing skill, that is just beginning, her ability to read and spell is unreal. She catches me off guard all the time as she reads something that I had no idea she could read, or spell a word that I didn’t even know she could spell. She is now spelling 5 and 6 letter words, we’ve never worked beyond 4 letter words.

It will be exciting to see everything that Selena learns in the following year.

Writing Stories

Yesterday morning after we dropped Pal of at the groomers, or broomers as Selena was calling it. We came home and I thought it would be fun to introduce Selena the art of story writing.

Supplies:

• A picture that will be interesting to your child
• Paper (we are using a notebook)
• Pencil or Pen

I glued the picture to the top part of the paper. We first looked at a book and talked about how a book or a story has a title. Selena pointed out the title on her book and found the title page. We also looked to see who the Author was, and I told her the Author is the person who wrote the book or story. I then told her she was going to be the Author. The first thing she had to do was look at the picture and decide what the title would be of her story. She very quickly came up with “Castles in the Sand.” I wrote that on the page, then told her we had to list her name as the Author. She wanted to try to write her own name by herself, but then decided to just let me do it.

With a few prompts or questions like:

• What do you see in the picture?
• How do you build a sand castle?

Selena’s story began to take shape. She managed 4 sentences to her story, and was very proud of herself when she was able to read it by herself.

Her Final Story:

Castles in the Sand

By Selena

The children build sand castles in the sand.

They dug a hole in the sand.

They put the sand in a bucket.

They turned the bucket upside down to make the castle.

The End

She had so much fun with this activity that I do believe we will make this a weekly event in our school. This promotes so much like writing, reading, language skills, critical thinking, analyzing, as well as retention of the written word and summarizing what the story is all about.

Later in the day I found this sitting on the table in the living room:

When I asked Selena about it, she informed me she was writing stories. This in itself tells me that Selena is turning the corner to have a great desire to learn to write. It may be scribbles now, but some day here these scribbles will be Selena’s words.

I am linking this to Giggles and Crayons.

Word Fun

Sunday after Church Selena was having a very difficult time with settling into anything really constructive. Lately she has been randomly running around spelling all sorts of new words. Some of her favorite words to spell have been words containing double o’s or ake words. In an attempt to get her to settle down a bit, I pulled out our phonics tiles. I asked Selena to spell as many oo words as she could. I laid the tile that has the oo on it and she went to town.

I thought it was cute how she went through the alphabet and spelled all the words beginning with b such as book, boot, before moving on to the c words, d words. She went through the entire alphabet, never once getting stumped when she came across a letter that didn’t work.

We then sat up the ake tiles, and again Selena went to town creating all the ake word she could again starting from the beginning of the alphabet and working through to the end.

She was disappointed when we got interrupted by her Uncle calling, normally during a time like this I just ignore the phone, but when it comes to my children calling that is a wee bit different. Then it was time to start dinner, so maybe we will pick this up again this week and work on a few more word families.

I am linking this up at Giggles and Crayons.

Writing and Spelling in our home

First let me say I didn’t think my simple post about Selena’s scribbles would create such depth in the comments. I truly wanted to step back and address where we are in this process right now, and how we approach writing and spelling at this time in our home. I think all the comments made very good points and appreciate all the insight given.

I believe right now Selena being only 4 years old, this is a time for exploration. While Selena has worked through the Kumon workbooks upper and lower case letters and the numbers, we never really used them as a formal curriculum. They were in her drawer for boredom breakers, or just for her to pull out when she felt like working in them. She worked in them over and over again. Selena’s job right now is to explore through her scribbles what she remembers and what she discovers in her abilities. I do not expect her to sit down at this age and focus on formal writing. I believe at this age there is a fine motor skill, eye to hand coordination that still needs to develop, this develops through play, scribbles, just being allowed to challenge ones self. Selena  is always shown how to write a letter if she asks, but many times she just starts writing the squeals with excitement when she has made a particular letter, then the practice takes off she will write that letter for days. Some weeks it’s been H, or D just what ever letter she discovers she can write on her own.

Our approach to Spelling is the same way. The only word I have really worked hard on to know that Selena knows how to spell is her name. Other wise all the other words that Selena can spell, are words she has learned through her reading the word many times in our books, or games we have played. While we have worked our way through Progressive Phonics, and this year a different phonics program, Selena has picked up many of the letter blends. Right now she just writes. I will tell her how to spell a word if she asks, but then again at her age it is all about exploration. How do those letters sound in those words as she listens to herself say them out loud. Many times she is able to spell the word right away, other times she will say the word, write it or spell it out loud only to rethink herself, and say “No, that wasn’t right.” She then tries again. Here we go again there is a fine motor skill that she needs to allow to develop, a listening, processing, and getting it from her brain to the paper before her, or what ever she is writing it on.

I am pleased with how far she has come with her writing and spelling. We have some wonderful laughs when she realizes she has wrote her C on it’s side, and she is looking at me, saying, “No, that isn’t right.” but there is no pressure at this time, as she will eventually get that C standing like it should as that fine motor skill matures. We also get so many laughs and chuckles when Selena tries to spell a word on her own. Just like a while back she wrote “Hi Self” on the white board, only thing was it said HI SETFL, when Selena went back to read the words to me, she got the funniest look on her face when she realized what she wrote did not make the same sounds as what she wanted to write. I want her to make these mistakes, and discover why it isn’t right, again focusing on the motor skill that still needs to mature.

Do I see this as a sign that she will have troubles with spelling or with writing? No, not at all, especially since she is only 4. At this age, should we really expect perfectionism from the child? Again I say at this age no. I know once her fine motor skills mature, what she is doing and mastering now will just enhance her ability to pick up the writing and spelling lessons in her journey to learning. I want her to be able to look at her mistakes and make light of them, ask for my help if she just isn’t able to figure out what she did wrong, or be able to go back and just say “No, that is not right.” The rest will all fall into place when it is the right time for Selena.

I am linking this at Giggles and Crayons.

Writing & Spelling

On Thursday I decided it was time to have a little chat about some behaviors that are unacceptable that we have been seeing in Selena lately. To keep her attention from roaming, I pulled out some paper and first asked her to draw a picture of herself. I thought I had scanned it in my computer, but I guess I didn’t. Her picture of herself was quite cute the way she even drew her lips instead of just a line for the smile. As we continued our talk I asked her to draw a picture of Pal. Instead of drawing a picture she wrote his name.

I was proud of the fact that she did this all on her own, needing no help from me with the spelling. While she has her lowercase a backwards, I know that she will figure that out as we move along learning how to write.
This was her attempt at writing Papa, you can clearly see it does say Papa, then she just had to add some extra letters on the end, D, O, and Q. Again she just spelled this on her own. Yes she has an extra letter in the middle of the word, I believe she meant to make that a p but got a little side tracked in her thought process.

She then decided to try to just write her ABC’s. Now this is her first attempt at making a B all by herself. Why she got the D before the C is beyond me other then maybe she is still a little unsure of herself when writing some letters. We are constantly finding her little written letters all over the house. She keeps discovering more and more letters that she can write. She is also discovering that she can write the numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3 and 5. The doodle pad has come back out which she hasn’t played with much in a long time, but now is exploring her new fond love of writing daily on.
As for the behavior, after our discussion this morning so far so good, we have had a very good day with none of the inappropriate behaviors. Sometimes I believe a child just needs a gentle reminder of our expectations.

Writer’s World Dry Erase

Lately Selena has loved to draw and write on the dry erase board again. She is always writing H, I, and other various letters. Today while she was practicing her letters I wrote her name on the board. I gently encouraged her to try to write her name as well by herself.

She was really pretty happy with her accomplishment in writing her name by herself. I knew she could do it if she would just try, since she writes most of these letters all the time anyway. The only letter that stumped her briefly was her N, but then she figured out where to start.

After this she went on to drawing her stick people. I thought it would be fun to introduce her how to expand on her stick people by using some simple shapes. We used a triangle for the body, circle for the head, then added the arms and legs. I drew one complete with buttons on the dress, and shoes on the feet, then it was Selena’s turn.

This was her first attempt, she only asked me to add the feet to it for her. I thought it was so cute how she got the head so small and worked so hard to draw a face on it. The one on the far left was her stick person she drew, of course that is after she insisted it needed clothes.

This one was her second attempt, she got the head even smaller. She had fun though and enjoyed drawing her stick people in a whole different way. Then of course she had to just have a photo shoot.

The photo shoot wasn’t complete until we got a picture of Pal watching Selena having so much fun writing away on the white board. After we were all done with this Selena had to put all the people in the dark, an idea she got off of Sid the Science Kid about darkness, she just scribbled black over the top of the people she drew to represent that they were in the dark. She erased the board before I could get a picture of this.

I am linking this up at Giggles and Crayons.

Phonics

We’ve been working on more complex phonics. Instead of just the simple phonic sounds we have been looking at all sorts of letter blends from consonants to vowel blends to build words. When we were at the library I came across a cute book that explores all these concepts.

  We read the book then pulled out our phonic tiles and had some word fun! If you have never seen phonic tiles they are just small tiles that are broke down into all the different letter blends. They have some tiles that are just the basic single alphabet, some that have the vowel blends, some with all the consonant blends, then some that have word endings, such as ain, ick, ight, etc…

We read the book again, this time using our phonics tiles to build the suggested words in the book. The idea in the book is to build the larger word then find the smaller word within the larger word. Such as the book tells a little story about a mouse who loves to ride on a train. Then it begins to rain. Selena built the word train, both ways first using the tile for the tr letter blend, then the single alphabet t and r, then she easily found the word rain by removing the t.

Selena enjoys playing with our letter tiles, and finds it easy to build words using all the letter blends. I love the way she can recognize most any letter blend I ask her for especially all the different vowel blends. I highly recommend these phonics tiles for a fun way of reinforcing phonics. Of course one could always make their own using anything from card stock to bottle caps.

I am linking this up at Giggles and Crayons, April’s new linky Writer’s World.