soonimaya

Golden pillar rising high

Will bring the Prince a bride.

In pain she walked so long alone

And now she'll be his prize.

-from "Soonimaya", a Fairy Tale from Nepal (adapted by Enki Education)

For the second half of our week we read and worked with the story of "Soonimaya", a Fairy Tale from Nepal. Towards the end of the story, the ill-treated heroine falls to her death, and a golden pillar rises up from the ground under which she is buried. The pillar is brought before the King, and when he touches it, the pillar transforms into Soonimaya, who then marries the Prince, and, as in all good Fairy Tales, everyone lives happily ever after. Here's J's picture of the pillar, representing the letter "P".

Now, I thought I was being far too obvious with my embedding of the letter P in the pillar. But neither kid found it, not even when they already figured out (from an emphasized reading of the verse) that we were looking for a P. Look below in my drawing to see if YOU can see it. Once I traced the P on my drawing with my finger for the kids, they were able to see it and trace it in their own drawings. But they certainly had more trouble with this than any other letter since the first couple of stories we did. I'm not really sure of the reason, but it may have been partially due to the fact that our rhythms were turned on their heads this week (due to other commitments), and we were doing the bulk of our story work in the afternoon rather than in the morning. Although they did a better job with the recall than I expected, given the time of day they both heard the story and worked with the recall. So, who knows!

The boys' big letters. Zoo Boy isn't even making an effort to follow what I'm doing, but at least he wrote the letters, in his own style. He did not, however, write any of the verse. And so the writing strike continues!












Even J wasn't particularly interested in writing. At the end of the second line he put down his pencil and declared himself done. I was surprised, as he usually works diligently until the entire verse is written. "You don't want to write the rest of it?" I asked him. "No, I'd rather play, " he said. I mentioned that he could play AFTER he wrote the verse, but he told me he'd rather play THAN write the verse. So I dropped it and he scampered off to play. (My instructions are that they can write as much or as little of the verse as they'd like.)

My drawing, for comparison. Honestly, I think that P is much more obvious than some of the other letters have been. What do you think?