Satori Smiles

We’ve taken a step back in our handwriting progress, but it should help out in the long run. This year I’ve noticed that Satori doesn’t have extremely neat handwriting, especially at a point where I thought she’d be improving. This became apparent to me after having local girls her age over, who demonstrated very neat and in control handwriting. Then I saw in one of the photos I took that Satori’s grip was all wonky.

I then discovered that I myself had an incorrect grip! Actually I have two different grips, both not good. I’m not too worried about myself, as I mostly use the keyboard now and the little handwriting I do is still neat and legible. But this is an opportunity to correct Satori’s grip. She is really working hard at it now. We used all of Handwriting Without Tears tips on using a correct grip. It got a little frustrating trying to get everything right. Poor girl might get turned off of writing at this stage if I push too hard though.

A few months ago I believed that pencil grips were unnecessary, but we need some kind of help! So I found these colorful pencil grips and got a bag of 6 – The Pencil Grip Crossover Grip Ergonomic Writing Aid. They have little flaps so your thumb and index finger stay in the right place. There’s a comfy spot for your middle finger to rest, and together, it all promotes a proper tripod grip. It is ergonomically correct for both right- or left-handed people.

Both Satori and I are using them. For me, my fingers just fall right into perfect place. My thumb won’t cross over anymore. For Satori, all I have to remind her is to keep her middle finger tucked under, as she used to keep it up on top. We’ve been using them for just over a week now, and they are fun and feel good! Time will tell if Satori can get this new grip ingrained in her head and use a correct tripod grip from now on.

We’re also working on tilting our paper up on the right side while writing. Here she is doing some copywork for Writing With Ease, a program we are growing to love.

Satori zoomed through her Handwriting Without Tears books and last fall we took a two month break (from everything actually). She continued to write letters and books, so I figured that her handwriting wouldn’t suffer too much. This month we started up Spring Semester and started only doing handwriting in our HWT Grade 1 book two times a week (we used to do it 3x a week). We’re doing one letter at a time, just a few pages.

However, I’ve noticed that her handwriting is not improving, perhaps getting sloppier, and showing some inverted letters. Lowercase letters are not on the proper line, they rarely descend below the line and sometimes aren’t tall. In HWT lowercase is either tall, small, or descending. I’m seeing this in our ETC workbook and all of Satori’s creative papers that she does on her own accord.

Time for some emergency practice! I’m using the StartWrite software which features HWT fonts to generate worksheets with all lowercase (we’ve actually never done this before). With this software I can specify not only the font, but the shading, letter type (dotted, dashed, or solid), starting dot, directional arrows, guide line options, and so much more. Our favorite is the lightest shading in solid, with a red starting dot, and only the middle and bottom lines. Just like HWT recommends.

This colorful worksheet Satori all the tall letters are circled in red, small are in blue, and descending are in green. I hope this will help her remember these if we do this worksheet now and then.

We will be adding these StartWrite worksheets everyday until her handwriting improves. We’ll also slowly go through Handwriting Without Tears, letter by letter this time to make sure we’re forming our letters correctly.

I’ll list a few examples of our worksheets generated this week. Below is Upper and Lowercase letters with directional  arrows.

Here’s an example of just the starting dot.

This day we covered “d” in our HWT book. They have clipart built-in to the software, how convenient! As you can see, Satori likes to add her own embellishements (nex tim sing wis me). We’ll be working on her pronunciation so she can spell correctly, lol!

Here’s some pages out of her HWT book, we’re reviewing the lowercase letters which we learned in the fall.

She’s pretty good at writing numbers, but 8 is a bit awkward. On these pages, Satori will make her own checkmark box and check it off if her HWT book “forgets” to include it.

Satori learned all her lowercase this fall and after a quick review this past week on how to write them all correctly, we present to you, Satori’s very first penpal letter showing off her lowercase letter skills! Satori told me what she wanted to write to her new friend Aspen, and mama dictated the spelling.  Coincidentally, this was also our very first time we actually tried to “properly” use Handwriting Without Tears Wide Double Line Notebook Paper designed for K-1. For her first letter, not bad. You can see she sometimes wrote capital letters in the same small space. She’s also trying hard to write her “e” correctly, so she redid that a few times.

I didn’t realize until recently this was indeed the perfect paper for Satori’s level. I had all kinds of “beginner” lined sheets, but all the lines are confusing. Which one to start on? What’s that dotted line for? What about all the colors – blue, red, green, black… Confusing! She ended up just ignoring lines altogether. But with the HWT paper, there is only the bottom line and the midline, which is all she needed to start improving on her lowercase handwriting. Plus, it has lots of room to write.

After we finished our HWT Kindergarten book, and before we pulled out the above paper, Satori and I spent two days practicing lowercase on HWT’s Blackboard with Double Lines.  Some letters took a few tries, but eventually she did some pretty good work. Below is a quick word I just had her do, but she was distracted and wanted to work on her computer, so she didn’t focus on perfection. But I wanted to show this word in particular, with a tall letter, a small letter, and a descending letter.

We have one more week of review, and then a short Christmas vacation, and then we’ll start in on  our HWT First Grade book.

to a little girl who never sees fall leaves… Sorry if we always take pictures of outgoing cards before the receiver gets them, but I love to document them.

Up here at 9000 feet in the mountains, we do not get to see rich reds and oranges in the trees, only vivid gold aspen leaves. And of course we see the greens of the evergreens. But it only takes 30 minutes to get low enough to find some of the colorful leaves!

Here’s sending some of that color to a little girl who doesn’t get to see the autumn color near her home… This is the same leaf we took a picture of a few days ago down in Lyons, Colorado, pressed and hopefully will be enjoyed a bit longer. The color faded a bit before we pressed it, but it’s still very pretty.

Satori wanted to write this letter, I had nothing to do with the sentences except to help her spell them. (And I didn’t help too much, I seem to have forgotten a word, hehe.) She’s come so far from the time we first started sending out pen pal letters. In the spring, I will probably not have to help her do anything to write her letters!

One of our first times taking advantage of the special HWT handwriting paper… The object is to fill the entire shaded square, but I haven’t pushed it too hard yet. It comes with 4 different types of shaded squares.
First, the paper with everything on it, so Satori simply copies the letters/numbers:

Next, her doing them all on her own with no help. I dictated the letters/numbers to write, but she can ALMOST do it all by herself. She always forgets the J and N.

All pretty legible, there are just a few letters she has to practice more, but part of it is that she is only 4 yet and is still developing her coordination I suppose. Needs to work on her 8, and making sure her 9 is facing the right way. We’re almost done learning our lower-case letters and then we’ll take a month to review and practice before we start our First Grade Printing book.

Yep, as I mentioned in my last post, Satori writes letters to us non-stop. When I came home from shopping today, to my horror I found her watching Sponge Bob. David was working in his office and turned the TV on. (I am not a big TV watcher and rarely turn it on.) Of course, with the commercials, she sees a Barbie she desperately needs. So I get letters about it. With these letters, she usually ignores the word spacing and punctuation marks she does know how to do!

(Keep in mind she only knows the most common sounds the letters make, we are only just learning digraphs and more complex phonics rules. It is interesting to see that she thinks WANT sounds out like WOD. )

I translated the first one: “MOM I REALLY WANT THE BARBIE. I AM SAD BECAUSE…”

More come after I refused to get her the Barbie doll. Translated: “MOM, YOU ARE NOT GOING …. ? …. NEVER AGAIN…” and another (not shown) “CAN I PLEASE GET BARBIE?”

Then she tries another tactic. A note just slipped under my office door (I keep closed so no animals get in.) This one says:

U R THE BEST MOM. I LUV U. U GET MR HRT.

“MOM, YOU ARE THE BEST MOM. I LOVE YOU. YOU GET MORE HEARTS” (with hearts drawn all over it)

And more, but I told her I couldn’t read the letter. She gets frustrated and stomps off. Returns with one last letter. The last letter said (she pronounces “because” as “beclud”:

MOM, U CN SAD IT AT BLUD I SADE AT

Which translates to: “MOM, YOU CAN SOUND IT OUT, BECAUSE I SOUND IT OUT!”

Lol!

Which brings me to really, really want to work on reading and spelling and handwriting with her. I can’t wait to get letters that I can easily read!

Daddy liked Satori’s artwork and we thought we’d give him his own copy.

We then thought it would be a good idea to practice handwriting with penpal letters, as we haven’t done that for awhile. First up, a little girl who just had a birthday (name erased for privacy). I LOVE Satori’s colorful balloons she drew!

Head’s up for a giveaway! My comments are now set for me to approve first (so people can’t see previous answers), so the first FIVE people who comment to this post will get their choice of a Little Gems necklace! The lucky winners can choose any necklace on this page. All you have to do to win, is to tell me who this little girl is, and where she is. Again, the first 5 comment repliers get a free necklace gift! (Valued at $38-54, on sale now in my Sling Outlet store)

On Thursday, 8/27, 10pm CST, the comments will be shown and contest will be over, and I’ll contact the winners for their choices.

You may have noticed that at one point I had listed Explode the Code (ETC) phonics program up on our curriculum. I had these all set to go as a supplement to our OPG reading program. However, the “Get Ready, Get Set, Go for the Code” books were just too simple for Satori at the time. She honestly learned all her letters and sounds in one night, by watching a Leapfrog video!

So over the summer we started our Ordinary Parent’s Guide to Teaching reading program, but it can be dull. She gets each concept very fast. However, even though she masters the new sounds quickly, it is altogether a different thing to be able to read sentences fluently! She sounds them out. She can sound them out quickly, but nonetheless, sounding out words detracts from fluently reading/comprehending books.

Explode the Code workbooks

So we’re taking a break from our normal reading program! Back to Explode the Code. We’re going to try these again, as she likes her HWT handwriting workbook so much, maybe this fall she’ll get into these workbooks.

Unfortunately, she has progressed to ETC  book level 3 now. The ones sitting on top of the above pile, that we already have on hand, are the A-C “Get Ready” books which covers consonants, which she knows very well already. But we’re going to try to go through them anyway superfast, like we do our HWT workbooks. In fact, she goes through her handwriting books so fast that we do need to stop and practice now. And luckily, ETC books cover lowercase letter handwriting practice! If it wasn’t for the handwriting instruction in ETC, I would probably wait until we got book 3 in.

We haven’t learned lowercase “f” yet in our HWT book, but we went over it today in her ETC workbook.  You can see she needs practice! But not too entirely bad for a 4 year old’s first time writing “f”s…

lowercase "f"

I am not sure how it will work out going through these early books (A-C), but I did order Explode the Code Books 2-5 last night, which takes us way beyond what we’ve learned so far in OPG.

Get Ready for The Code A
Consonants b, f, k, m, r, and t

Get Set for The Code B
Consonants d, h, j, n, p, and s

Go for The Code C
Consonants c, g, l, q, v, w, x, y, and z

Satori loves to practice her handwriting. She has tons of little journals. They don’t say anything that makes sense, but this week she’s been trying her darndest to sound out words, so that if I really try to read them, I might be able to get the gist of some phrases.

A few weeks ago we started the Kindergarten HWT book – “Letters and Numbers for Me”. I had typed up a lesson schedule to go over a few pages a day, but she would wake up and ask to work on her new orange book, so I went with it. She’s now finished her Capital letters review and we’re *finally* to the lowercase letters. If you read my blog, you’ll know that we’re quite excited about it. So I celebrated this event with her by making an official Handwriting Book for her to keep her handwriting practice samples.

Satori's Handwriting Book

As you can see, it’s one of those floppy 3-ring binders with a place to display a cover page. So we went to town decorating a cool cover page, complete with glitter, jewels and stickers! Our new HWT paper arrived this week, so we will stock it with this. The bottom sheets are the Gray Block Paper for capital letter practice, which includes 4 different types of sheets – Starting Corner, Center Starting, Alphabet/Number and Blocks for Words. The top sheets is the Wide Double Line Notebook paper for sentences that include lowercase.

HWT paper

Here’s a sample of her capital letters she did a few days ago. We will still need to practice them, but they’re looking good!

She loves her Handwriting Without Tears program, each workbook page has little illustrations to color, which she loves. She’s not a workbooky gal, but she loves working on her book, but she goes so fast on the practice and doesn’t like to be told “to fill in the gray squares” or to take her time. We also love all the extra multisensory activities that reinforce her letter formation.

This blog post might come in handy, as on BOTH homeschooling forums I frequent, there were people asking about all the extra tools (aside from the workbook/manual) for the Handwriting Without tears program. Here are a few of those “extras” in action… I gave links to my HWT posts and now whenever I write a post about Handwriting Without Tears, I tag it as “hwt” and this link: http://satorismiles.com/tag/hwt/ will show all related posts! I am doing the same for any other curriculum (MUS, AAS, SOTW, OPG, ETC).

Our next lesson (lesson 14) in Math-U-See (MUS) will cover counting to 20, but it requires that Satori write the numerals. So I spent the beginning and middle of this week reviewing handwriting numbers 0-10, we’ve never “officially” spent time learning to write numerals correctly. She was starting to write them backwards and incorrectly.

So we went over our number pages in the back of the Handwriting Without Tears Student workbook (“Get Set for School”) and using my new StartWrite Software (I will dedicate a blog post to this soon), we went over the correct formation of the numbers 1-10. Today we added multi-sensory fun with our Play Dough and See and Stamp Screen.

Numeral 3 on Stamp and See Screen

We usually first start with the Stamp and See Screen using the magnetic stamps that come in HWT’s famous 4 shapes. Then Satori would draw them on. After 3 days of going over numbers in the workbook, handwriting sheets, and this, Satori can write a numeral on demand! She’s got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 down pat. The numeral 8 she used to draw with 2 circles on top of each other, but now we are following HWT’s method of drawing a Capital S and then back up. Her 8’s turn out a bit flat, but she’s improving! Good enough for me until this fall when we tackle it all over again in more depth in HWT’s Kindergarten course “Letters and Numbers For Me”.

We also reviewed the capital letters C, O, Q, G, S, and J with our Roll-A-Dough Letters. Since it was going so well, I even snuck in the next lesson, and we formed the numerals 1-10, as well as the next set of letters (D, P, B, R, K, A) on our Stamp and See.

Roll-A-Dough Letters - Letter J

Handwriting Without Tears (at least the Pre-K/K programs) is extremely flexible. We’re tackling many letters and numbers at once, as Satori already is familiar with all her capitals and numerals. So far it has been worth it, even at our accelerated pace, as her handwriting has improved tremendously. In the next workbook, we’ll be perfecting the capitals, and starting lowercase.

Satori loves to write so much that I can’t wait until we tackle lowercase.