Satori Smiles

The past few days I’ve been taking photos of a few of Satori’s stories, poems, journal entries and even instructions. Here’s a few, just to demonstrate how much she loves to write at age 5.75. I hope she keeps this up! I am looking forward to kicking it up a notch for our grammar and writing this fall.

We received a letter from our penpal today, and Satori rushed off to write her back a letter. She wrote a letter, and then asked if she could send her a song. I said sure, you’ll have to write down the words like a poem. So she did! While singing her song the entire time…  A lovely summer scene while nighttime approaches…

We are going to be learning how to write a poem down on a page soon, so I’m looking forward to seeing future poems from Satori.

Did I mention she spends half her day writing stories? She’s got one wrapped up as a birthday present for me – “Barky the Dog”.

Today she is working on “The Scary Night” (her title is spelled “sceiry” but she has since learned how to spell “scary”).

She still writes in her Bird Journal. Here is her notes on the Pgymy Nuthatch. Yesterday she wrote about the Great Blue Heron.

Here’s another – “Egypt’s gods and Tut” by Satori. I don’t think I knew how to spell Egypt when I was five years old. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know what Egypt was at that age!

I am glad she is retaining her history studies, we studied this way back in early spring. Here King Tut prays to Horus, Isis and Anubis.

Blue Bairy Intrukcins count as writing too!

Found this lying on a table folded up, and found the money inside… Curiosity prompted me to open it. Click for more detail.

Looking at it with an analytical perspective (I never correct to Satori these things she does for fun), most words are spelled correctly, except for “dear”.  One backwards “D”. Sentences have proper end marks. One sentence fragment. One apostrophe is correct, one is out of place. Pretty good for not going over most of this stuff yet for a 5 year old.

Look for a new letter we’ll be sending out soon Gramy! You’ll even get to splurge on something.

I mostly posted this because David and I thought her drawing of her flashlight was so cute and she didn’t leave out any details!

But I also love to periodically post updates on her informal handwriting, writing, and spelling skills. Satori just loves to write us notes and letters. I never correct anything on them, but it’s interesting to see how she progresses. In this note, her handwriting was pretty good, except for all the capital D’s in Daddy. Her writing was okay, the grammar is sound and she remembered one period for the first sentence. Misspellings include “plees” and “baterees”, but I’m impressed she got some words correct that we’ve never studied yet – in particular “light”, “read”, and “tonight”. I think the more she reads, the better she’ll get.

One of Satori’s favorite activities is writing stories, notes, and letters. Usually she’ll sit at our kitchen table and use up tons of printer paper. Then we get all the pages mixed up and lost. So I had to find an inexpensive solution so we could feed her interest and keep everything more organized.

The past two times we’ve been to Lakeshore Learning I picked up a colorful set of 10 blank books. I think with their 20% off Back-to-School sale they were about $5. Then we got some other white journals with lines to write on, I’m finding out we love lines to write on, it makes it so much easier to read her writing, hehe.

Once she starts a book, she gets very engrossed and nothing can distract her. One day she made two books. She really wants a lizard pet, so one was “To Be a Lizard”. The other book was entitled “The Huge Beast”. Check out that scary monster stomping over the town!

Translated:

To be a lizard, you must behave good. Some live in the wild, some have a person.

This book she started it backwards so you have to read the pages from right to left.

After they got home Sofia saw a map. What’s that? answered Hely.

I don’t know. Hely look at Quasha but she jumped up to unfold the newspaper. Inside it showed a huge beast. Sofia read it. A monster in Texas is living by a church. Hely said “Oh no! We got to save this town!”

I love her little drawings. This one is showing the backs of the three girls looking at the newspaper. The lizard book had tons of cute little lizard drawings. I took sample pictures because both of these books and a sample blank book are being sent this week to two pen pals!

Here’s the program we’re going to use to explore more writing with Satori – Write Source. The book below is the Kindergarten book, and it looks perfect to start out. I mostly hang out on classical homeschooling forums, so I very rarely hear people talk about Write Source, but I think this might work out well for us.

Satori was eager to jump in and work on the pages. The first pages do not assume that the kindergartner knows how to write words or even the the whole alphabet (it says to write letters you know), so it seems age-appropriate for kindergarten. I just wanted something very simple and colorful to introduce the basics of writing. After introducing the concept that letters make words, it goes into sentences. This is page 10.

Most of this we practice in both copywork and spelling dictation, but we haven’t formally covered what a sentence is in the first place. After covering very simple sentence basics, it introduces the Writing Process. Satori loved looking at this page and couldn’t wait to start a story. But in this book, their version of a story is just one sentence, two at the most in the end. Satori is used to writing entire stories, but I’m looking forward to the simplicity.

Following this simple model – Prewrite, Write, Revise, Edit, and Publish – should be fun. She immediately thought of a topic – cats, and then gathered some details: fast, shap (sharp claws), wiscurs (whiskers) and pointy (teeth).

Here’s her sentence. It should be a good starting point to edit today. I am not going to focus on correct spelling when we do this program, unless she requests it, all I want to do is get used to capitalizing sentences and using end marks. She should pick it up in no time.

We only spent 10 minutes yesterday on this, and she begged to continue. However we had already covered a third of the book in just one session and I want to go more slowly from here on. The rest of the book covers forms of writing (journals, lists, signs, captions, stories), and themes to write about.

In her freetime creative writing, I’m not going to worry about spelling or grammar, I never bring that up in her stories. But I’ll be quietly looking for improvements in her writing. I’ll continue to supply her with paper, bare books and more to encourage her love of writing. We’ll see how it goes!

If I could describe a day in the life of Satori lately, half of her waking hours would be spent writing! She started the day writing a story in an entire 28-page Bare Book. She then wrote in her new Animal Journal. In the afternoon, she gave me a few letters. And so on… I’m very proud of her to do all this, but it also overwhelms me. Should I be concentrating on giving her the skills to write better? In particular, all this makes me want to go faster in spelling so she spells her words correctly… go faster in grammar so she knows how to write proper sentences… go faster in writing so she knows how to organize her thoughts… My perfectionist tendencies are making me very anxious about all this, I feel like I’m going too slow for her in certain subjects.

But she’s only five, so I should just relax, right?

We follow the Well-Trained Mind philosophy closely, and they discourage creative writing until 5th grade I think. We are using their curriculum on both 1st grade writing and grammar and these are very gentle and appropriate for this age. But I’m wondering if they are too slow for our situation, with a very eager little writer. I rarely talk about these new programs we started using this year on this blog, but I’ll go over them now.

FIRST LANGUAGE LESSONS

For grammar, we are using First Language Lessons (I refer to this as FLL). This was easy enough to start a year ago, but you’re supposed to start when the child is reading at a certain level, so we stopped and then officially started again this spring in January 2010. We do it a few times a week and all spring we only covered nouns. Only this week did we start pronouns! We also covered several poems, which Satori memorizes very fast. I think it goes very slow and has lots of repetition, so I’m wondering if we could use a different curriculum. Or perhaps just go at a faster pace? As of this month we are going to do FLL 3-4 times a week instead of just twice a week, we’ll see how that goes. Below is the lesson we did today, we are on Lesson 50. The book we have covers both Year 1 and 2, and there are books that cover Year 3 and 4.

This is the only grammar program with which we have experience, so I am not sure how I feel about FLL. I’ll try it throughout the summer and hope it picks up. We are not doing any of the copywork it has in the book, as we do enough of that in other subjects. However, today, Satori wrote down the pronouns we’ve learned so far on her own accord.

Although I’m not 110% gung-ho on First Language Lessons, it is doing the job and it is one of the easiest things I teach her (as is anything by the WTM team). It also is nice as it covers things such as days of the week, months, poem memorization, and more. If it sounds appealing to you and you want to use this program, a new version is coming out this September, which is supposed to go better with the writing program I’ll be discussing next. The main difference is that they took out the redundant copywork that is also covered in the writing book.

If anyone has any suggestions on a good grammar book that might be more fast-paced and engaging, I’m all ears! Oh, I forgot I do have Painless Grammar Junior, which supposedly is meant for grade 3, and I do think we’d need at least one more year before we start that one. Oh, and I can’t wait to re-learn grammar myself, I used to love diagramming sentences. (Is that nerdy?) Anyway, it’s been such a long time and I think I forgot a lot. Am I putting apostrophes in the right place?

WRITING WITH EASE

For writing, we started The Complete Writer: Writing With Ease: Strong Fundamentals which also covers 4 years. I’ll refer to this program as WWE, everything has an easy acronym. Another very gentle and super easy-to-teach program. You’re supposed to do it four days a week and each week covers a piece of quality children’s literature. (We only do this two times a week.) The first day you do Copywork, writing a simple sentence, pointing out the sentence structure such as capital letters, end marks, capitalizing proper nouns, etc… You get a choice of two sentences, one very short and simple and the other a little longer.

The next day you read an excerpt from the literature and there’s a short series of questions your child answers in complete sentences. Then you ask her to narrate one thing she remembers from the story. All pretty easy, although I sometimes I end up reading the passage two times for her to answer the questions correctly. Her narrations started out as summarizing the entire passage, but lately we’ve gotten that down to one sentence, which is the point anyway when first starting out.

Here’s her copywork. You don’t need their student workbook, but I downloaded a PDF so I had them all printed out. You could just as easily use your own paper. Obviously Satori doesn’t pay attention to the lined paper they use.

I love getting the teasers of the literature they use as well as the practice listening and narrating. I do enjoy the copywork, but hope it will rub off soon in her own writing. I’m just not sure it’s enough in our particular situation. She just writes so much, I want to formally go over sentence structure with her. You’d think she’d understand what a sentence is after all this copywork, but she says she doesn’t understand what a sentence is when she writes on her own.

So in one of my next posts, I’ll talk about a new writing program we’ll be easing into this summer. I think we’ll still do Writing With Ease a few times a week.

During the time it took me to write this post, I got 3 pages of letters/drawings from Satori. She asked me what my teacher’s name was when I was a little girl, and then she presented me with “Your Old Class”, subtitled “Miss Osin” and a picture of me in a classroom with Miss Osin. Then she drew a picture of the Scooby Doo gang and they all had something to say about me. Daphne says “I think Angela is so prity!” Velma says “Angela is smart”. Shaggy says “Shes with me”. Scooby says “Shes a heerow!” Ah, a nice little laugh before bedtime.

So I’ve had this nature journal laying around. It isn’t the easiest to find, so I wanted to wait until Satori was ready to write in it. She begged to have it and finally I relented and gave it to her. I’m so glad I did!

She works on it every day. She’s adapted her handwriting to fit in its tiny spaces obviously made for older children/adults. She talks about her own children and how one day they will read it, and in her journal entries, she writes about this. She’s so super proud of her book.

Here is her very first entry, on the American Robin. You can click on the photos to see larger images.

The Robin one is hard to decipher, but it goes like this (spelling and grammar mostly corrected):

Robins have the most pretty colors in the world. It is bright brown and some dark red on the belly and gray feet. They like to be on the ground in Wisconsin. They like to eat worms. They have a beautiful voice and they fly out to get out of danger. They have long beaks and their beaks are sharp. When Robins need to warm up they fluff up their wings. They build their nest with horse hair and man hair and mud which warms the eggs up and the eggs have their mom to warm them up too with her nice furry coat.

When you see robins that means it is spring. Robins are not one of the smartest birds in the world but they are kinda smart and they nest in branches that you can’t reach them. If they nest in little trees you can reach the branches.

Robins build their nest with mud. Their eggs are blue…

Here’s one she finished last week about the King Bird.

My favorite part is this:

Kingbirds do an amazing thing. Here is what they do. When they (see a hawk) they would just get into a fight. Isn’t that amazing? Kingbirds have a yellow belly. It has a red patch on the top of the crest, black tail, and a dirty gray breast. They have a sharp bill, brown wings with a little bit of white. It likes to sit on telephone wires… has gray legs and a light blue back, white throat. (….)

Ask your mom to show you a picture of a kingbird. There’s a teeny bit of blue on the wing, the rest is brown just like I just told you. Black pupils… curved stripes in the tail. Sound goes like this – kip song, kip song, kip song.

Ask your mom to teach you about birds. You will learn about so many birds. I learned a lot of bird. Soon you will be an ornithologist and you will love being that kind of person. When you grow up, teach your children and soon they will write about birds too. When you’re seven you should read this book to your mom and dad. They will be so surprised that they will buy you a present. When you’re nine you start to make your own breakfast. I started when I was five.

It’s a beautiful summery day on the weekend and while we wait for Daddy to finish up some work, we decided to write to Satori’s pen pals. Here she is at her desk, sporting a carrot mustache. We have been making fresh juices every day and this one had carrots, apples, celery, cucumber, alfalfa sprouts and orange. What a delicious way to sneak in vegetables!

We’re excited to add a new pen pal today! The past half year we’ve really only been going back and forth with one little girl who lives in California. We’re adding a little boy today and this letter is heading out to the same state.

A bit about this particular letter. We are using our new Handwriting Without Tears “Regular Double Line Notebook Paper, where the lines are spaced 3/16″ apart. Her handwriting has been getting smaller and she started her 2nd Grade HWT printing book last month, so this paper is going to be great! The Wide Double Line we used to use was 5/16″ spaced lines.

I really wanted her to write this all on her own, mispellings and all, but she was adamant that she spell everything correctly. So she asked for help on which “OW” sound the word “mountains” had. After I said to use the “ou” spelling, she then proceeded to spell “how” as “hou”, hehe. She still needs reminders to use periods at the ends of her sentences. But she tried very hard to use her “proper grip” and write neatly for her new friend.

Hmmm… That last sentence, let me explain. This weekend, Daddy is going to sleep in the bottom bunk of her big dollhouse bed, and she will sleep on the top bunk. She gets so excited about “sleepovers” like this, and she even packed Daddy’s toothbrush/toothpaste in her bathroom and his pillow on the bed.

My first real “homeschooling” post in a month and a half! We’ve been quietly continuing on in about half of our subjects. I’ve uploaded a few photos of Satori’s spelling lesson she did today, as they show multiple progress on various things – spelling, handwriting, and writing.

Today we hit the middle lesson in our Level 2 AAS book. These lessons (when we do them) just fly by, she learns certain things so quickly and some spelling things she picks up on her own. Today’s lesson was the double-e “ee” vowel pair making the long-e sound. The only word she spelled wrong was “dere” instead of “deer”. But she does correctly spells the word that doesn’t follow the rule, which is “been”.

You can see she understands sentence structure and sentences with capital letters and ends them appropriately. We do need to work on doing this in her random journal entries and letters to people though. Her letters are pretty much all formed correctly. But I have failed in getting her to use a correct tripod grip. She doesn’t think she writes as neat when she uses a proper grip. Frustrating, but I think I will move on from that.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Satori loves to write books. Normallly they are her own original stories, but today I noticed a new story lying on the table that looked a bit familiar. We had just finished our read-aloud this week of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. We are looking forward to seeing this movie in two weeks. So naturally, Satori felt compelled to recreate the story in her own words and illustrations. I couldn’t resist sharing her story.

Disclosure: Normally I don’t share these stories, as there are rampant misspellings, but just so you know that Satori only recently turned 5 and hasn’t had a lot of spelling lessons that a normal writer would have. So without further ado, I take you through a few pages of Satori’s Alis in Wandr Land.

Title Page

Here is Alice and her sister in the beginning of the story. Her sister is reading a geography book while Alice is sitting in the tree with her cat Dinah. Translation: In spring, Alice was playing in a beautiful (forest?).  The butterfly is saying “Look”.

Translation: Mister Rabbit came but he said, “I’m Late! I’m Late!”

Alice falls down the rabbit hole…

These is just a sample of the wonderful stories and letters that Satori writes everyday. Each time I read a story of hers, I am compelled to rush her through her spelling program, but overall, I’m so very proud of her.