writing samples and thoughts

First a bit of a disclaimer. We do not work on writing, as anyone who's been reading along knows full well, but J's been working on it on his own for the past...well, several years anyway, I guess technically longer. He mostly writes on his Magnadoodle, as he can get the most consistent results that way (he's got a bit of a problem with being able to apply enough pressure to the pencil/crayon/etc, but actually that's coming along as well at this point and he's writing more short notes, etc, on paper -- although the writing he does on the Magnadoodle is much more involved and extensive). I thought it would be fun to post some examples of his writing from time to time to document his progress.

This above photo is something that he wrote one morning upon first waking up. It was last Monday morning, and he'd gone to bed at the halftime of the Patriots/Cowboys game (football, our family obsession) on Sunday night. He jumped out of bed Monday morning and ran to the Magnadoodle, and duplicated a sign he saw during the game (there's that photographic memory again). It's an acrostic -- CBS (read down the left side) was the network broadcasting the game, so the sign read:
Cowboys and Patriots
Bring us to
Super Bowl XLII

Which is all fine and well, but here's where things start to get a little funky:

Do you recognize this? Why not? It's Russian for "Enjoy Your Meal!" Doesn't every nearly-7 yr old American child write in Russian?



How about Chinese? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what this one says, but I do recognize some of the characters from our In The Leaves book, like rice, fire, field, sprout, pig and mouth.



Here's something a bit more traditional, the name of one of his favorite musical groups, written out in decorative lettering. I always wonder if something like this is considered writing or art, I guess it's a combination. But it's one more way to work on those letters and their usage, so it's contributed to writing one way or another anyway!

This is actually the most interesting of the batch to me, because it's sort of how Enki Education introduces the letters in the Language Arts portion of their curriculum. (There's a Y in the center of that Yak's head, in case you didn't pick that out -- in yesterday's art post I mentioned this picture.) Mind you, Enki's approach is a bit more involved -- first you read a fairy tale written to represent the letter, then you do a led-drawing (the parent draws, the student follows their lead and duplicates what the parent drew) in which there is a letter hidden within the drawing which the child then discovers. Something tells me that J's not going to have any problem with that portion of the curriculum. That same something also tells me that maybe it's time to look into starting those drawings with him. I've been putting off starting formal artwork with both of my kids due to a combination of their fine motor skill challenges and the fact that I'd rather spend the nice Autumn weather outdoors immersing ourselves in nature and working on gross motor skills. There will be plenty of winter ahead of us to work on seat-work at the table.

Another issue is that these sorts of things are a part of the 1st Grade Curriculum, which we haven't purchased yet -- our intention had been to transition J to 1st grade next year (for those of you who don't know, he's a little bit "behind" grade-wise due to all of our time working on Autism remediation with him). But clearly I think he's ready to forge ahead now, at least with some of the 1st grade materials, so you know what'll be on my Christmas list! We're going to have to tread carefully, though, there's a lot of things that the Kindergarten curriculum still has to offer him that he badly needs, I don't want to go skipping willy-nilly ahead and leave important developmental work behind. So it's going to be a balancing act to meet him where he's at with the Language Arts (and probably the Math too), yet leave him enough time for Kindergarten stories and exploration.