Language Art Lesson 1, Day 2

(8/22/11)

Material used:

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

We took a couple of days off for a trip out of town, but we repeated the poem multiple times a day and it was obvious that Kamina was seeing the picture in her mind and that helped her retain the poem.

We started the second day of the lesson with a reading of the poem looking at Kamina’s drawing. Then I showed her the letter story cards of c, o, and a. The letter stories are PAL’s way of giving each lower case letter personalities and helping the children remember the letters and sounds more easily. For example, the letter "c"says, “I’m a happy cookie because somebody took a bite out of me.” The letter "o" says, “Aww, nobody likes me, nobody took a bite out of me.” The letter "a" says, “|a|; Don’t pull my ponytail!” (She keeps her ponytail short, so it is hard to pull.)

Kamina definitely likes the letter stories. She couldn’t stop laughing and giggling whenever we repeated the stories. We acted it out with pretending to bite cookie of c, crying for the letter o, and pulling each other’s hair playfully just as the letter a.

After that, we practiced printing the three letters using stick crayons on the paper roll on her desk. The reason the three letters are introduced together is that they are formed similarly. All of them start with a curve beginning on the right. The difference is that "c" doesn’t finish as a round cookie because a bite has been taken out, while "o" is a complete round cookie, or an open crying mouth, and "a" is a head with a short ponytail. Kamina had no trouble with “c” an “o”, but “a” required a fair bit of practicing. At first, she kept doing it backwards, doing it more like a deformed p, because she started the letter from left instead of right.

It worked when I told her that “a” is an angry girl, but she still likes cookies, because all girls like cookies (just like Kamina). So “a” starts like the happy cookie letter. She then remembers to start writing “a” just like writing “c”, and then finish it with a short ponytail, because the girl doesn’t want it to be pulled. We still need to work on this letter more, but it’s a good start. Also it gives myself a mental note on doing some more curved line form drawing in the near future, and probably with the vertical symmetry drawing to correct the reverse tendency common in young children first starting to read and write.

Kamina then spent some time coloring the letter story page with crayons to her hearts’ content.  I intend to paste this into her main lesson book page later with a writing /copying of the letter stories.

I also showed her the printout of the practice page of the first three letters introduced, and told her that it’s for her to practice on her own.

We concluded this part of the lesson with me reading her the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I gave her a few of the story sequence questions for her to sleep on and we will retell the story together tomorrow by answering these questions.

Story summary questions I asked:

Who are in the story?

What do they look like?

What did they do?