Three Names doesn’t exactly have a plot – it’s more a rambling series of episodes strung together – but one of the more dramatic elements is a prairie tornado. Yesterday Michael and Alex explored the topic of tornadoes together.
The Maryland Science Center has a cool tornado apparatus in their TerraLink exhibit where you can watch tornadoes made of water vapor form, dissipate, and reform. So they played with that for a while, and then went across to the physics gallery to play with the water vortex there, for comparison.
(Note: not our picture, or our kid either)
They also watched some tornado videos on YouTube, which is a surprisingly useful homeschooling resource.
This morning we carried right on with the tornado theme with a book called One Lucky Girl
So we talked about what similes are and I showed her examples in One Lucky Girl, and then she identified similes in Three Names as I read the book. We stopped to discuss a few thorny cases: is “the blue blanket sky” a simile? (No, it’s a metaphor.) If similes say something is like something else, is it a simile to say “the schoolroom smelled like baked potatoes and butter?” (No, because it literally did. Similes are comparisons.)
Afterward I asked Alex to come up with some similes of her own. I provided the prompts and she provided the similes. I am particularly pleased with the last one; she initially offered “as silly as a clown” and I asked her if she could describe something particularly silly about the clown. Mission accomplished.
The giant was as big as an eight-story-high house.
The snow was as white as clouds.
Colin was so wild, he was like a tornado tearing up the house.
Colin was as silly as a clown pouring water on a wildebeest.
I also asked Alex to trace and copy the words Three Names. We have fallen badly out of the habit of doing any handwriting practice at all, and it showed. She struggled to get her letters looking the way she wanted them, and the size of her lower-case letters varied dramatically.
I’m afraid we have a vicious cycle going with writing: she hates it and complains like crazy, so it’s easy for me to drop it, so she doesn’t get any better at it, so she hates it and complains like crazy. We need to do something different. I’m thinking that I might have her write a “word of the day” every single day. Paradoxically, it seems to work better to always do a disliked thing, rather than to do it occasionally.
?
You once gave an example about how Alex thought some things weren’t math problems, just little puzzles stuck in the math book for some reason. And another example of mathematical hopscotch. So I wonder if there’s anything like that for handwriting — or if the only way to improve handwriting is to drill.
Also, I wonder whether anyone (other homeschoolers? Waldorf schools?) have tried leaving handwriting to age 7 or so.
As you might already have noticed, I have (a) a serious hot button about having been a left-handed kid with “bad” handwriting, and (b) attractive and functional printing and cursive writing as an adult. I honestly think that part of my problem was that I was too young and also poorly co-ordinated in general, and the other part was that it mattered a lot to the adults around me and I was stubborn.
One of my home education mailing lists has a ton of anecdata that boys, in particular, have terrible handwriting until 11 or older. The anecdata seems to show that the kids who are good at drawing are also good at handwriting, which is just drawing letters, when you get down to it. They do a lot of practice with things like shaving foam, too.
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I’d be curious to know how the handwriting is going for you, almost a year later. I am having similar struggles with my 5-year-old, left-handed daughter. I have yet to figure out the best place to draw the line. She hates writing, and it’s a huge struggle for her. She struggles to even hold a pencil correctly. So, do I keep trying to help her do that or just back off for now?
Our phonics curriculum has brief handwriting exercises for each day, and we’ve been struggling through them. I want to help her, but I don’t want to hinder or discourage her in this area. Suggestions??
Hi Kelly! Glad you found my blog. Are you doing Five in a Row, or did you find me some other way?
We’ve come a long way with handwriting in a year. Especially at this age, I think this can be something where you need to just hold on and wait for maturation to kick in. If you look here you can see a sample of what Alex’s handwriting looks like these days. (The post has a picture of her spelling dictation.)
What I think wound up helping us the most, besides just Alex getting older:
(1) Focusing on the positive. When she did copywork, I’d have her pick out the letters she thought looked the best, and I would do the same. We really focused on what she was doing well.
(2) Writing with markers on a whiteboard. I wouldn’t do this for penmanship practice, but it was great for other tasks that involve writing. You might consider trying the phonics exercises on a whiteboard.
(3) Short, consistently scheduled practice. This is really key. Alex did a short sentence of copywork three times a week for several months before I started asking her to write more on paper. One sentence and done, maybe five minutes of work. But it always happened.
This post talks about some of the things that were going on when we started to notice real progress.