Language Art Lesson 1, Day 6

8/31/11

Material used: 

• The Lower Case Alphabet in Second Grade, Supplement to the book “Sixth Sense Reading and Writing”, By Sofi Mandil (Age 10) & Kristie Burns
• Stockmar stick crayons.
• Stockmar block crayons.
• Main lesson book paper (we used DRAWING PAPER 17.5in x 11.5in)
• Blackboard Chalks

We have been busy this week and today we had a little time to continue with our letter lesson. We did a quick review of the "a" story, and Kamina was able to remember most of the story and gave a good summary for it. I then told her the "o" story from The Lower Case Alphabet in Second Grade by Sofi Mandil (Age 10) & Kristie Burns: "The octopus wants to play". It's about how an octopus started playing with a beach ball with two boys on the beach. Kamina thought it was a funny and sweet story.  After some discussion of the story, we played the I Spy game again with the short o words. Then we copied the pictures to her main lesson page. She's getting more comfortable with drawing every time. Even though she knows that octopus has eight legs, she decided that she likeed drawing the legs so much that she wanted to draw more than eight. So she declared that she was drawing jellyfish instead of octopus and added a whole bunch more legs, which was pretty cute and funny.

After the drawing, she said that she had a tummy ache and wanted to delay the writing part of the page till later. Instead, she wanted to do the rice job instead. It's a Montessori practical life activity. I put a lot of colored rice in a container, and we have a variety of wooden bowls and some wooden spoons for her to scoop from one container to another. It has always been a calming job for her. She also likes to pretend serving different bowls of rice to me and herself and her imaginary friends and makes a game out of it. After she was done with the job, she swept up the spilled rice with her little broom.


While she was doing the rice job, I copied out the words we picked out of the stories for each letter onto three separate main lesson pages. This time, instead of the golden paths we have been using for the letters to walk on, I drew three lines of blue, green and brown to represent sky, grass and earth for the letters to walk on. This is similar to the line papers that are typically used for placement of letter writing. But I thought this is a more artistic way of achieving the same result and it proved more appealing to Kamina as I expected. She liked the idea that some letters like to just walk on the grass, while some are tall and stick their heads way up in the sky and some like to dig into the earth. She watched me writing down the word list, and was quite agreeable to the idea of copying a few words regularly. So I made her a few sheets of color lined paper for that purpose. The idea is to do some interesting copy work regularly and practice the phonetics in the context of words and the stories they came from.