Satori Smiles

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.