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.

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?

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.

Language Art Lesson Plan

For Kamina’s language art curriculum I’m using the Primary Arts of Language Reading and Writing package from Institute for Excellence in Writing as the skeleton and Waldorf methods of story telling as a way of introducing new letters, sounds, word families and other language arts concepts. Traditional Montessori methods of colored word series will be used to practice and reinforce the learned concept and skills. Contrary to the normal Waldorf sequence of introduction, or the PAL’s for that matter, I will introduce the upper and lower cases together, instead of one ahead of the other. It seems to make the most sense, especially since we are doing copying and printing from the beginning and using both cases simultaneously in sentence writing.  One of the things of PAL that is different from almost every other program I have seen is that it introduces phonograms and phonemes at the same time as introducing letters. I think this actually is in keep with Waldorf’s philosophy of whole to parts. Another common ground between PAL, Waldorf and Montessori is that none of them is solely phonetic or sight, instead they’re a combination of both, as English language is not purely a phonetic or sight language. And in keeping with all three programs, when we first introduce something new, we don’t need to drive anything home, it’s the constant exposure and repetition through stories, poetry, games, movement, drawing and modeling.


Story telling is Waldorf’s way of introducing letters. It seems typical in all the curriculum material I’ve read so far that Waldorf schools introduce (capital letters) through an ongoing story. In such a story, there usually is a group of main characters going on a quest. Every so often, the father/mother figure would tell a story (often times than not a Grimm’s story) that would introduce a new letter. The student(s) then draw some pictures depicting the scenes of the story, along with the capital letter. Sometimes the letter writing is tied in with form drawing as well. I really like this way of introducing letters. From observing Kamina, children usually love stories, and through the telling of stories, the letters have a more concrete association in their minds. Adding to that, the drawing and acting out the story only reinforce the impression.  


Sandpaper letters and sound objects/pictures is Montessori’s way of introducing letters/sounds. Sandpaper letters is often credited as one of the most important Montessori material for teaching language. It combines the sense of touch with language learning, in a way, letting the fingers memorize the shape of a letter as well as the conscious brain.  Sound objects/pictures let the children get familiar with the phonics associated with each letter. In my opinion, it adds breadth and depth to the vivid impression introduced by the Waldorf stories, hence the two complement each other rather well.  There are other language material used in Montessori setting that works really well in the writing practice, such as moveable alphabet, sand trays, etc.