little falcon

Golden oak gates rise up from the ground,

Guiding the child where gifts can be found.

Far flying Falcon, fold forth your wings,

And guide me back home with the gift that you bring.

from "Little Falcon", an original Enki 1st Grade Fairy Tale

This morning we wrapped up our first 3-day Language Arts cycle, in which we read the Fairy Tale "Little Falcon", and introduced the letter "G". To the left is J's drawing of Little Falcon (the prince hero of the story) as he's about to enter the golden oak gate, which he drew, following my example, yesterday. This morning we searched for and found the letter in the drawing (the gate). J needed a lot of help with it, but was delighted when he realized there really WAS a letter hiding in the drawing.

Here's Zoo Boy's rendition of the same drawing -- I doctored up his "G" just enough so that it was recognizable as such. This type of drawing is a bit over his head right now, and I gave him the option of drawing whatever he wanted instead, but he was quite insistent on being involved in ALL the school work, so persisted with the activity and was even adequately pleased with the results. (Much to my relief -- I was a little concerned that he would think his drawing wasn't as good as J's or mine, but there was no such complaint from him.)

After finding the letter this morning, the kids wrote a large capitol "G" and lower case "g" in their "good books". On the top is J's letters, on the bottom is Zoo Boy's. These are written with block crayons (Stockmar Beeswax crayons). The kids colored in the background of their page first with a light colored block crayon.

The final activity was to write out the verse, as much as the kids were comfortable doing, with the page I'd written out yesterday (and which we've read/recited several times in the past two days) posted vertically as a guide. (Copying down words from a vertical surface works on too many skills to even list!) The background on the page was prepared by me in advance, and is referred to as "forest paths" in the Enki materials -- it's a gentle way of keeping the kids' writing in a straight line. This photo is of J's work. He chose to write out the first two lines of the verse. As he recited the entire verse, he noted, correctly, "the gift is the crystal from the Falcon".

And here's Zoo Boy's version. He chose just to write out the first two words, and then added dots and scribbles in place of the rest of them, although when "reading" his page, he'll recite the entire verse. Again, this activity is far beyond him, but he very much wants to be a part of the whole process, and I'm certainly not going to try to stop him!

I'm really excited with how well this first 3-day cycle went! There are a few things I need to tweak a bit, but all in all it was a great first attempt at teaching in this format. Next week we'll have two Language Arts cycles, as will be typical of our weeks during our Language Arts blocks.