mischief in Alpha-Beta

This week we worked with the Enki Education 1st Grade Language Arts story "Mischief Comes to Alpha-Beta". I already posted about the little hiccup we ran into when we tried to recall the story the day after I read it initially, and what I did to remedy that problem. Here's the rest of the story!

The tale is about odd-consonants and how they use trickery and magic to steal letter sounds so they can reside in the city of Alpha-Beta. After recalling (and summarizing) the story (the day after the 2nd telling of it), we drew pictures of the main characters in the story. And the following day (today) we located the letters within the pictures ("C" in the two upper left-hand drawings, Q in the upper right, X -- the spaces between the faces -- in the lower left, and J in the lower right), then wrote in some words using the "stolen" sounds (one word suggested by each of us).


That first drawing was J's. This is Zoo Boy's. He again did all of his own drawing and writing, even though he chose only to write his own suggestions. But still, that's fairly huge progress for him. I've noticed over the past several weeks that he is reversing some of his letters (N and S being two of them), and he's forming a lot of his letters from the bottom up. I blame that mostly on my having been lazy about working handwriting practice into our rhythms this year. So for that reason, and given that J still occasionally draws a letter from the bottom up, I've decided to have the boys work on handwriting sheets during our summer break to hopefully at least keep their handwriting skills from slipping over the summer. And I'll make continued handwriting practice more of a priority as we start up again in the fall.

My drawing, for comparison.

You'll note the simple "Y" and "Z" at the bottom of the drawings. This is because these two letters slipped in before the Giant closed the gate to the city. We didn't talk about them (although we already discussed "Y" as a consonant last week) in the context of this story, I just put them out there to consider. Next week, the final week of our last Language Arts block, we will talk about Z and wrap up the entire year by writing out a chart of all the letters, and begin organizing our Language Arts Good Book pages for binding during our final week of schoolwork for the year.

This particular story was not a required part of the curriculum, but I wanted to use it (despite the kids' initial difficulty with understanding it) because there is a feeling of coming full circle. In the very first story we read this year, "Little Falcon", the child passed through the golden oak gates. And here, in our final story of the year, the Giant closes the gates to the city where the alphabet resides, just as we complete our work with the individual letters. I'm a big fan of symmetry, and working with this story at this time brought about a really nice feeling of completion to it.