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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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