Language Art Lesson 1, Day 1

(8/18/2011)

Material used:

• Primary Arts of Language (PAL) Reading Teacher’s manual and student book 1.
• Stockmar block crayons.
• Newsprint paper.

The first day, we started with the poem from PAL Reading: September.

September

A road like brown ribbon,

A sky that is blue,

A forest of green

with the sky peeping through.

Asters deep purple,

A grasshopper’s call,

Today it is summer;

Tomorrow is fall.

I read the poem to Kamina a couple of times first, and then she belatedly repeated after me and enjoyed the rhyme. Then she asked me to explain to her what the poem means. When I started explaining, it struck me that it’s such a colorful poem that I could put it all in drawing. So when I started drawing the picture depicting the image described in the poem. Kamina was so taken to it that we started looking at the picture and reciting the poem almost immediately.

We did that a couple more times, and then she wanted to draw the picture with me. So I gave her one of the practice paper and I started drawing the picture again while she copied me little by little. It’s the first real block crayon drawing she has ever done. Before that, she absolutely favored stick crayon for drawing outlines and thought that block crayon was hard.

With the breakthrough of the first successful drawing, she was so happy about it that after the lesson, she kept filling out entire pieces of paper with different colors of block crayon, and happily told me that she was practicing with block crayons.  The lines in the pictures are form drawing (curved lines and straight lines) practice from previous days.

After the drawing, we read the poems several more times and I put the printout on the whiteboard. That concluded the first part of the lesson for the day and we went to bed.