One reason I can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that it's April already (though thankfully temperatures outside are starting to provide evidence that it's really so!) is that it means we're rounding the corner and heading down the homestretch of our first homeschool year.
Having gotten almost an entire year under our belts, I'm letting myself chuckle a bit as I peruse catalogs and begin to place orders for books and supplies for next year. I still love reading over curriculum suggestions and planning what to use, but I feel much more realistic (in a good way) about what we might need and what might work for us and our particular learning/teaching styles.
I spent a lot of time poring over books and catalogs in the years before we officially started homeschooling. I read The Well-Trained Mind (at least major portions of it) long before the sweet girl was even born. I've put thought into educational philosophies and approaches and why we felt called to do this. That's all good, but after a while, one begins to realize that "ideals" (whether in books, curriculum catalogs, or fellow homeschoolers' blogs) are always going to look a bit different "on the ground" when you begin to try to work them out in actual practice with your actual five year old and in your actual family's home and life situation.
I had one of those humbling, practical moments last week that just made me laugh. We've been concentrating a lot on handwriting this year. I knew going into the K year that it would be a challenge for the sweet girl, whose fine motor skills have always lagged a bit. And I confess I was nervous about teaching the mechanics of handwriting. I could barely remember learning to write myself, and I was pretty sure I was clueless about how to teach someone else to do it.
We've been using Handwriting Without Tears, a program I highly recommend. We seemed to be the ideal candidates for it. I still remember the day we started the program -- and S. cried, because she found learning to hold a pencil the correct way so hard. How long ago that seems! I'm pretty sure those were the first and last tears connected with handwriting though. She loves it now; in fact, we do handwriting first thing each morning.
In the fall and early winter, we worked on writing numerals and learning correct formation of capital letters. In later winter and now into spring, we're working on formation of lowercase letters (we've done about 10-12 letters so far, and are learning about 2 new ones per week).
One thing I began realizing about three weeks ago is how much more enthusiastic the sweet girl's response to writing practice is when I give her something "real" to write. Sitting her down with a line of lowercase "t"s and "r"s isn't very exciting, but getting her to write HAPPY BIRTHDAY on her grandmother's card is. She kept showing how hard and happily she could work when given actual words or phrases to copy. We will still practice rows of letters, but for the past three weeks or so, I've been writing a phrase or a short sentence each day on her lined tablet, and she copies it. Most of the time, we're still writing everything in caps, but the rest will come when she's more confident of those lowercase letters.
For a while, we had no shortage of things to write: HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY! or TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING. Sometimes I write something quite mundane, like TODAY IS FRIDAY or THE SUN IS SHINING. But she's been wanting to branch out and learn to write other things, and she's been particularly taken with the idea of writing out some of the things she sees written in books, especially those books she's learning to read.
Great! I thought. We're beginning copy work! We're on our way to practicing the kinds of copy work I read about in homeschooling books, all those months and years ago. Copy work where you provide students with excellent writing examples, beautiful prose from stories, inspiring quotes, encouraging words from Scripture. I had borrowed the idea when I'd had her practice her capital G's at Christmas time, by writing "GLORY TO GOD!" and illustrating the page with angels.
There are books that actually provide lists of the kinds of things you can have your students write. Of course, most of those lists are for children at higher ages and skill levels. So...I knew I might need to get creative.
On Friday, S. brought out one of her favorite readers, which she has been enjoying for the past couple of weeks: P.D. Eastman's Are You My Mother? We decided that we would choose a sentence from that book for her to copy. Ah, our first copy work involving literature she loves to read, I thought, feeling a bit emotional as I thought of the inspiring beauty of this moment. "What sentence shall we choose?" I asked.
And yes...you guessed it. What she most wanted to write were the immortal words of baby bird: "YOU ARE A SNORT."
So that's what we did. Taking care, of course, to have a good discussion about quotation marks and what they mean and how to write them. With Mom taking care to have a good, hearty laugh (inwardly) about the way the practical and the ideal sometimes mesh in real life!
6 comments:
I always enjoy reading about your adventures with the sweet girl (and it makes me smile that your call her that--so many parents have many less positive nicknames).
But this post reminded me of my teaching days. I taught second grade back in the 70s when I was still living in Kansas. And one of my many challenges was that I had to teach cursive writing to 7 and 8 year olds. Now, personally, I still think that's too young for many of them, but that was part of our curriculum. Before we started, I spent many hours with the handwriting book myself. Handwriting had always been hard for me. Mine was legible but not pretty and I had a horrid 6th grade teacher who chose to focus on my unpretty handwriting whenever she talked with my mom. So I became even more self-conscious about it, even though my mother was very supportive of me.
My other challenge was that, out of my 21 students (the only year I had a nice sized class--the rest were all over 30), seven of students were left-handed. So, basically, I had to learn to write left handed so I could help them. For a while, I was fairly good at it. From my own experience, I was also inclined to praise than criticize, and for those who found it very difficult, I spent more time working with them individually.
One of the things I used to do was to write a poem on the chalk board for them to copy. I had an old book of poetry that was full of wonderful poems, some I'd heard by poets I knew, and some that were new to me as well as to my students. It was fun to find a poem that suited the day, the weather or the season, and something that we all enjoyed as a beginning to our day. I've always wished that I'd kept the book, but it came with my classroom, so I left it for the next teacher to use, and hope that he or she enjoyed it as much as I did.
Pat
LOL! Love that sentence!
I had a really hard time figuring out how to hold my pencil right. I think it was the end of first grade before I really got the knack of it, and I remember being very frustrated by it. It sounds like she is well on her way with her writing, and copying favorite sentences from books is a great way to encourage that!
Wow, Pat, I'm trying to imagine teaching 20 or 30 children how to write cursive! School teachers amaze me! And am I *ever* glad that the sweet girl is not a left hander. :-)
I'm glad you like our nickname for her. She has several actually, including Bear or Boop (or Booper) but I settled on sweet girl here in the blog a while back, as it's a name we often use for her. Of course, like all of us, she has her tart or even downright sour moments, but I do think that God has blessed her with a sweetness in her disposition.
I'm definitely looking forward to having her copy short poems and scripture verses next year, once all the harder work of learning basic letter formation (printing) is behind us. I've not yet decided when we'll start cursive, but it'll be a while!
Erin, I know what you mean about struggles with holding a pencil! I was really helped by the teacher's guide in the Handwriting Without Tears book. Hmm. Suddenly I had to learn how to teach someone how to hold a pencil, and it's just not something I had ever thought about...I don't remember much about learning how. And once you get the knack of it, it's as natural as breathing. So this was a huge learning curve for us both.
I'd say she had a couple of weeks where she was very conscious of "how" she was picking it up, and then one day I just noticed her do it very casually, and since then it's not been a big deal! I was watching her write today and was realizing just how far she's come in a few short months.
And hee...yes...I love that she chose "You are a snort."
Ditto on loving the sentence that she chose! It's always the "odd" things and facts that they remember--when I asked my kids to draw a picture of what they remembered when we were learning about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the facts they took away were that Lincoln was a wrestler and Washington was rich and liked dogs. Sigh.
Edna, that makes me chuckle! I'm glad I don't have the only "odd kid" (not that I thought I did!). It IS funny what kids zero in on sometimes! But then sometimes they totally surprise us by retaining more than we expect, or zinging us with an insight we could never come up with from our adult perspective. Guess it's what keeps teaching and parenting so interesting. :-)
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