the bear boy

Bashful boy had no one to teach him.

He walked in the canyons so old.

There he befriended two bumbling bear cubs;

And learned to be brave and be bold.

From the Pueblo Fairy Tale (adapted by Enki Education)

Our story for the first half of this week was "The Bear Boy", a Native American/Pueblo Fairy Tale. Here's a photo of J's story drawing -- can you find the letter "B" hidden in the drawing? The bear's body makes the "B". J still had trouble finding the letter and needed it pointed out to him, even on my drawing where it's pretty obvious (since I knew why I was drawing it!). This surprises me a bit -- I thought he'd have a much easier time figuring out where and what the letters were. Interesting! Zoo Boy did not complete his drawing this time, something that I will blog about separately.

We then drew the large capital and lower case "B"s. In examining his handwriting this week and last, I have decided it's time to bring in active handwriting work to our practice sessions. (Enki Education recommends using "Alphabet 8s", which I'll explain in another post.) Zoo Boy DID write his large letters, but he did not use adequate pressure with his crayon to make the marks distinguishable enough to capture with the camera.

J works on copying the story verse from the large sample that I prepared, and that we've been reading from. He ran into a lot of trouble, which you'll see below. Zoo Boy chose not to participate, instead filling his "forest paths" quickly with scribbles and declaring himself finished. Which is fine by me, this is pretty well beyond him at this point, I'm sure we'll be revisiting these sorts of activities in the future with him. Right now these activities are aimed at J.

J's finished verse. He's having trouble staying straight within the forest paths, and tried to put more than one line of text on a single forest path -- I'm thinking that narrowing the paths a bit will be more helpful to him, so next time I will do that. Also, I noticed that he alternates between capital and lower case letters (which I think is common with early writers). He also used the number "2" instead of "to", and was pretty proud of that fact. I only commented "we're working on writing our words" and left it at that. Both of these things (use of capitals and substituting the number) seem to result from him having memorized the verse -- he didn't check with my sample much at all (when he did, he reverted to using lower case letters, like in the sample). Just interesting things to note, nothing that I plan on "doing" anything about right now, we'll see how things come along as we progress with our year.