The Nixie and the Mill Pond

For the first story of our first Language Arts block, I chose "The Nixie and the Mill Pond", a Western European Fairy Tale, from the Enki Education 1st Grade library. Above is J's written version of the story verse. (He self-corrected his own spacing problem between "wild" and "waves" by inserting the proofreading/editing symbol for space -- I still have no idea where he learned these symbols!) He's a little over-zealous with the apostrophes, but I'm just keeping an eye on that for now. This second picture is his drawing from the story, with the Hunstman's wife weeping by the Mill Pond's edge. (The Huntsman was drawn under the waters and held captive by the Nixie for a foolish promise his father had made on the day he was born.)

Here's Zoo Boy's drawing of the same scene. He had a lot of anxiety about doing the drawings as we started up again, but he was very pleased with his results and ran to show it to his father when he got home from work. So hopefully he'll feel more confident about future story drawings.

And here's The Boy's writing sample. At the end of last year, he was writing the first letter of each line. Today he agreed to write the first word of each line, so we're making progress there. He's still writing in all capital letters, and he's still switching off between hands to write, so there's a whole lot more work to do with his handwriting. At the top of the list is more woodworking! And more crawling type activities during circle/OT work.

My drawing, which the kids used as a model for their drawings (we drew our drawings together). I was actually surprised at how lacking in detail J's drawing is, but I'm guessing that once he gets back in the swing of things and is used to doing led drawing again, he'll start embellishing more on his picture. As it is, he used "wavy" letters in his title, so that it would "look like water", so I thought that was pretty creative.

We're off and running!