bearskin

Bundled in bearskins, he carried his burden

Through mountains so misty and cold.

Many a month, buried beneath them,

He traveled so brave and so bold.

From the Western European Fairy Tale, "Bearskin"

Here's J's version of the drawing to go along with the Fairy Tale selection for the second half of our week, "Bearskin". This scene depicts the main character's 7 year journey during which he was unable to wash himself or shave or cut his fingernails, and was required to wear the skin of a bear as a cloak, so that he looked more like a monster than a man. Even though J strayed from my drawing, his depiction of Bearskin really did capture the feeling from the story! And fortunately, we were focused on the letter "M" for this drawing, not "B" (which Bearskin, in profile, depicts).

The "B' can be seen better here in Zoo Boy's drawing. He actually requested a lot of hand-over-hand help with his drawing, and was very pleased with the results, which confuses the heck out of me given his problems earlier in the week. Maybe he truly just didn't like that other drawing.... But anyway, the writing of the title is all his.


Today we found the "M" in the mountains of the drawings, and then wrote the big capital letter and lower case letter in our good books. However, J (top) didn't see the need to actually write them large. (His exact words were "I don't mind them small". Hm.) Meanwhile, Zoo Boy decided to draw them without watching me first, because, and I quote, "I already know how to make a "M" ". Keep in mind, he wrote a "W" first, only adding another line when I pointed out that his "M" was upside down." Me thinks I need to re read the Teaching Guides about this activity as I seem to be slowly losing the integrity and intent of the exercise.

However, I did manage to find a way to help J out with his writing. I gave him smaller forest paths to write in today (about half the size from the past two story sets), and a colored pencil (Lyra Giants) to write with, the results of which can be seen here.

At this point I have three concerns about his writing:

First, he doesn't use any spaces between his words. Which seems to be a common problem for a new writer, so I guess I won't worry about that quite yet.

Next, he is using more and more abbreviations in his writing -- in this sample, he uses "M.t.s" instead of "mountains" and "&" instead of "and" in both places that word came up. I have no idea if I should or shouldn't do anything about that -- someone suggested to me that it might be a form of creative spelling, which should not be discouraged, so I'm afraid to say anything about it at all. He knows he's doing something "different" when he does it, because he'll do it, then stop to look at me with a sly smile on his face before going back to his work.

Last, the way he forms his letters are a bit cumbersome. It's how he learned on his own to make the letters, and involves extra motion and a general lack of flow. His pencil grip is not great, but he's accepting my adjustment of the pencil and his fingers and is trying really hard to write the way I am showing him, so I'm not worried about that. But his letter formation needs some help. That I DO know to work on, with the "alphabet 8s" I mentioned earlier (and will details when I have some photos to go with it as well). So I'm confident I'm on the right path with that.

In general, this was an AWESOME story set, both kids really seemed to enjoy the story and the story work.