More language arts bragging

I stopped taking pictures because I never got around to taking the pictures off my camera. But I want to brag on my kids a bit.

I didn't want to drop the routine of school over the holidays since I find restarting school is horrible if I let the kids do whatever they want for two weeks. Instead we got a very pared down version of school. We started at 8:30 instead of 8:00, cut out almost all of our regular school activities, and instead did some more fun stuff.

Glitter wanted to learn cursive, so I decided to teach her over the break. Sparkle was in second grade when I taught her, and it took about two weeks. Glitter was far more motivated than Sparkle. So motivated that she was begging me for lessons and practiced on her own. She always wanted me to teach her more letters so that she could write more words. She was thrilled that the first few letters I taught were "a" and "d" so that she could write "dad." She got mad at me when I explained I wouldn't teach her the letter "o" until the end, because she wanted to be able to write "mommy." Glitter did so well with the lessons that I figured it would be shame to stop without completing the alphabet, so I'm still teaching her cursive now that break is over.

Anyway, here we are, and she has only two more letters to learn: v and w. I'll teach them to her tomorrow. This girl does an amazing amount of writing. She writes in her journal or log book every day, which is usually at least a sentence. She does her spelling, which is a couple more sentences. Plus, she is currently doing cursive, which is almost the entire alphabet twice plus several more words.

I think that I'm strange in that when I teach handwriting I have my kid write the alphabet. I don't have her do copywork or write anything else for handwriting instruction. Just the alphabet until she can form all the letters without having to think about it. Glitter did try to do her spelling in cursive today, which was a bit tricky because I couldn't tell if some errors were handwriting errors or spelling errors. A side benefit from Glitter's interest in cursive is that Sparkle has started writing in cursive again too.

For Sparkle I found another writing breakthrough. Postits. I got dragged into using Postits from Brave Writer. When I first read about having to use Post Its for their product I was extremely resistant. After using the Post-its with Glitter a few times I saw the potential. I still hated using Post-its with Glitter, but I found great potential for Sparkle. I had her make lists, with each item on a different post-it. Then I had her sort the post-its. The post-its make a huge change in how we approach pre-writing. Instead of trying to make a graphic organizer, compose sentences, or some such, Sparkle could focus on coming up with ideas and organizing those ideas as two separate tasks. The post-its are too short for a whole sentence, so it's easier to put a single phrase or idea on one post-it. The post-its are easy to move around, yet stay where put, so that it's easy to try out and evaluate different arrangements, not re-writing involved. Plus, writing on a post-in is just less intimidating than a blank piece of paper. Oh, and I just throw out the post-its when we're done.