the "ail" family

The first half of this week we worked with another word family, the "ail/ale" family. After telling the story on Tuesday, we recalled the story (filling in the "ail/ale" words on our town board) the following day, and the boys did a free drawing from the story. Zoo Boy in particular was excited when we got to the part in the story where they "ails" visited the town of Conso Nant!


Here's J's drawing, of Auntie's great blue whale that finally led them home. (I love how the whole family is sitting on the whale's back!)









Zoo Boy's drawing, again of the town, but this time adapted for the "ail" family. You can see Grandma's sail, Mom's rail, Big Sister's nails, water at Papa's feet that he needs to bail, Baby's pail, and at the top, Auntie's whale, and the paper on which Uncle wrote down the whole tale.

During practice time the boys had writing assignments (which you'll see below).


Today we read the limerick together, filling in the other "ail/ale" words on the board.

Above is J's writing from the past two days. I'm finding that he has an easier time staying on task if I'm doing handwork nearby. Otherwise his mind tends to drift and he gets easily distracted. But in general he's really building his writing stamina, it took him far less time today than it did last week to complete the 2 stanzas of verse.

I've taken a bit of a new approach with Zoo Boy, since he's showing that he's willing to work on his writing now, but is still only using capital letters when he does. So I made up these handwriting sheets for him (with simple symbols showing how to form the letters). Yesterday his instruction was to write 5 "ail" words from the limerick, today's instruction was to write 5 "ale" words. He was a little alarmed yesterday when he asked if he could write in capitals and I shook my head. But once he got going and realized he could do it, he was quite pleased with his work.