rumpelstiltskin

Frolicking round the flickering fire,

He fanned the flashing flames.

Fast and furious flared the fire;

Soon all would know his name.

-from "Rumpelstiltskin", a Western European Fairy Tale (modified by Enki Education)

As I mentioned previously, we are only doing one story cycle this week, due to the holiday. So our story for the week was "Rumpelstiltskin", a Fairy Tale that most of my readership is probably familiar with. (Which can be said about most of the tales from Western Europe, as those were the tales most of us grew up on.) The kids of course loved this story, and being a fairly simple tale, there was no problem with recall the next day (which is why I chose this one at this time!). The embedded letter ("F") is extremely obviously in the drawings, and extremely well-supported by the verse, and I felt that observing how the kids worked with this story might help me make better story selections for the rest of the block. J immediately saw the "F" (probably saw it the day we drew it even, but if so, he didn't say). This first drawing is his.


Zoo Boy made a crazy mess of his title, amusing himself greatly in the process. Other than getting me to help him with the initial background (saying "Now you will help me with my drawing, or I will color on you instead!" Nut!!), he did all of his own story drawing, and while he was being fairly goofy about the entire thing, it still looks like a fire, and still has the obvious letter "F" in it. He refused to draw Rumpelstiltskin in the pictures for some reason that I couldn't quite understand, except that he seemed to get that it was the fire the drawing was about, not the little man at all.

The boys' letter Fs. I was actually surprised that Zoo Boy took this part of the activity seriously, because it was the ONLY part he didn't do in an outlandishly silly way. When we got to writing the verse, he started by scribbling a pencil line across the middle of each "forest path" as usual, but then added a bunch of flourishes, such as circling each line and outlining the forest paths themselves.








J's partial verse. I am not the least bit surprised that he didn't write out the entire thing, because he put way too much time and energy into doing just this much of it. Can you see the "F" that starts the verse? It's very ornate and boxed in, "Just like a Fairy Tale letter, " he explained. He then went on to go over each and every letter he drew several times. Finally I asked him WHY he was doing that, and he said to make the letters darker. I asked him if he just wanted a darker pencil color, and he said "No, I'm doing it this way because it's fun. And fancy. Fun and Fancy --both start with "F"! " There was no more discussion on the subject -- I mean, I can't argue with that kind of logic!! Of course, after the second line, he declared his hand to be hurting, and I have no doubt he was telling the truth about that, given that he'd written about three times as much as required! So he read the verse one more time and went skipping off to play.

My story drawing.

So -- what have I learned in my observations on this story cycle?

Well, for one thing, I'm pretty sure that my Adventure Circle is not rich enough in proprioception activities to properly ground my children, especially without having our morning walk to accompany it. We need a lot more jumping, crashing, stomping and bumping to get my kids in their bodies enough to handle a half hour's worth of seat work. So I'll start working on our next circle over the coming weekend, and load it up with what they need. I'm a little shy about dumping the one we just started last week so soon, so I'll probably just add a couple more sensory-rich activities to the existing circle and use it for one more week. But I purposely made it focus on mid-lines and tactile, and that's obviously not what my kids are needing at the moment (or at least I need to sprinkle those mid-lines around more proprioception-heavy work).

Next, J is seriously lacking in writing stamina. I need to put the chalkboard paint I bought to use and get an area for him to work on great big vertical letters to loosen up his arm motion mechanisms -- I think he's just too scrunchy in his writing position.

And finally, I do think that the simpler tales are definitely the way to go with my guys. So I'll take a closer look at what lies ahead in the materials I've already picked out, and put off some of the more complicated ones until next year.

Ahh, the luxury of homeschooling and being able to totally change your curriculum plans to meet your individual children's needs!!!