the golden stag

She's held safe in the vines

Between his strong antlers,

As through valley and vale they venture.

--from "The Golden Stag", a Romanian Fairy Tale (adapted by Enki Education)

The story for our first half of the week was "The Golden Stag", which featured the letter "V". You can see the "V" here in J's drawing, between the stag's antlers. The kids immediately knew what letter we were focusing on and where to find it. The story was a little bit intense in places, so I modified it to what I thought the kids could handle, especially for Zoo Boy who is deathly afraid of being left all alone, I thought the description of the children's abandonment in the woods was a little much and chose to state it in a more matter-of-fact manner, and without the scary details. It seemed to work, as neither child were frightened by it. It also was a bit longer than the stories we've used up to this point, with many components, but the kids did a pretty thorough job with the recall, so obviously it wasn't too long.

Here's Zoo Boy's drawing. A lot of hand-over-hand was involved in the initial shading, but after we got the basic form of the stage down, he took off on his own with the details, including the antlers which were of course an integral part of the drawing.



I went back to our "old "method of drawing the letters (coloring the background first, then writing the large letters on top of it), and the kids responded much more enthusiastically to it. Zoo Boy seemed to have a particular problem with this letter, I'm not entirely sure why.







For the first time, I tried the "golden star" method of drawing gold stars between J's words while he was doing his writing. I didn't explain in advance, I just reached over after he wrote his first word and drew a golden star next to it. He laughed and looked at me, but I was already back to my own writing. So he wrote the next word and I did the same thing. Zoo Boy asked what the stars were for, I said "to make sure the words don't run together". From that point forward, J would hesitate and read the word he just wrote to prompt me to draw in the star for him. I'm pleased with the results. Not only do his words not run together, but he also seemed more careful about his letter formation and keeping the writing straight within the forest paths. I'll do the same for the next couple of verses we write, then back off and see if he's internalized the spacing. Also, he did write a "&" instead of the word "and", and told me he was going to use a symbol instead of the word. I wanted to suggest writing the word instead, but didn't want to be any more involved in the activity than I already was with the stars, so I just said nothing and he used the symbol. After I'm done being that involved with his writing, I will find a way to gently suggest writing the word instead of the symbol.

And here's my drawing, just for comparison's sake for those of you who like to compare.