ah -- vowels, part 1

Watch, my child, the path of heart,

For darkest night will soon depart.

Then sparkling sun will touch his wand,

As red and gold fill path and pond.

-from "The True Name of the King", Enki Education Grade 1 Academic Story

This week we are introducing the vowels, through telling and working with the story "The True Name of the King". There are five true vowel sounds, Ah, O, E, U, and A, and then there's I, which is a diphthong. The story tells a bit about each vowel sound, so we tell a piece of the story each day for a week, painting the story (and vowel sounds) the following day. We started yesterday with the first part of the story, where a poor girl begins a quest to discover the true name of the King, and today we painted "Ah".


The paintings are mostly to create a color theme for each vowel sound, which is repeated throughout the Language Arts work with the vowels over the next couple of grades. "Ah" is also referred to as the "Golden A", and the color theme is gold. So we painted a sunrise to reinforce the color, the sound, the verse, and the story.


Here's J's paintings, and how we set them up -- we painted the backgrounds on each first, then added the sun to the upper painting, and a large golden "ah" to the lower. These are "led paintings", meaning that the kids watch me paint with one color, then they paint the same thing, then I do the next color, etc, the same way we do our "led drawings". This is the first time I've done anything more than let them free-form with their paints prior to this (although I did give simple instructions with the "color dancers" type painting we last did). I wasn't sure how the kids would take to the led painting, but they seemed to really enjoy it.

Zoo Boy's paintings. After painting his "ah", he asked me WHY we were painting "ah". I did not answer him directly, but rather read the verse again (we read it during our recall of the story before we started painting). "There's a lot of "ah"s in that verse, " J noted. "Ah!" I exclaimed, and smiled. The boys giggled and ran off to play.

After letting them play for awhile, I gathered them back with our story time song, and we read the next part of the story, where the girl discovers that she did NOT have the correct name, and comes up with another guess. When I finished, Zoo Boy said "I don't think she's got the true name of the king, tomorrow she's going to be told that's not right again." The kids wandered down the hall discussing what the true name of the king might be.

So far this has been my favorite story to work with! I just love this light approach to the complicated vowels, and I like how the entire week is going to just weave a complete story by the end. It's very nourishing for both the kids and me!