Language Art Lesson 1, Day 3

8/24/2011

Material used:

• Primary Arts of Language (PAL) Phonetic Games
• Stockmar stick crayons.

 We did a short session today as we had a video conference with family and there was not much time left before bedtime.

We started with retelling of the Goldilocks story by answering the questions I asked Kamina last time. Kamina did an amazing job of retelling the story almost all by herself. And the amount of details she was able to remember and recreate with words was impressive. What was funny is that some of the small details and words that she used was not the more traditional version I used in the last session, but from a picture book rendition of the story by James Marshall. For example, in her retelling, the bears “took a spin on their bicycle” instead of “going out for a walk”, and Goldilocks “climbed out of the window” upon seeing the bears instead of “raced out the door”. This is pretty remarkable considering we haven’t read the book for months, and yet she can recall these small details almost word for word.

After the retelling, we recalled the letter stories for the letters we learned last time, c, o, and a. She needed a little help remembering. But with a little reminding, she cheerfully reenacted the three letter stories, the ponytail story being her favorite. She just couldn’t stop giggling when we pretended to pull each other’s hair. Then she wrote the letters on paper. The letter “a” needed a little work, but after a bit practice, she was able to write it quite well.

Before the end of the session, I showed her the letter story game I had premade. It was the first game from Primary Arts of Language (PAL) Phonetic Games. The game board is the alphabet in the form of printed letters, both upper and lower cases. The game pieces are the game story cards. We only have the first three letter stories so far. Kamina is to match the story cards with the printed letters. As we progress, more story cards will be added. I was a bit afraid that she would think that the game was too easy, but she responded pretty well, and happily matched the story cards to the letters by inserting the cards into the paper clips I taped to each of the letter grids. After that, she colored the c story card, and we put the game folder into her activity pile with the practice page. And that concludes the day.

 So far, for the main part, I’ve followed PAL packages pretty faithfully. Tomorrow I’ll start deviating and bringing in more Waldorf elements, starting with stories for the three letters and a drawing for each of them. Hopefully this change of pace will sustain Kamina’s interest and deepen her impression of the letters.