Language Art Lesson 1, Day 5

8/27/11

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

Today we continued with our letter story of lower case a from The Lower Case Alphabet in Second Grade, very much like what we did with the lower case c story.

We started with Kamina retelling the “The cloud that cries” story with a little reminding from me. Then we thought of the words that has “c” in it and I wrote it on a sheet of paper, underlining the letter “c”.

After that, I told her the story of “The perfect apple”. It’s a story about a perfect apple that can talk and play and has his own plans. When he discovered that the boy was going to eat him, he wiggled and wriggled to tip the basket over so that he and the other apples could escape.  In the picture, I had the apples in the shape of the lower case “a” with some green leaves on the stem.

 To my surprise, after the reading she told me that she didn’t like the story. When I asked her why, she said that she wanted the boy to eat the apple. To solve the problem I told her that when she drew the picture she could draw the boy, and that the boy could pick up the apple.

Then we played a little “I spy” game while I read the story for a second time. She was to shout when she heard an “a” sound word during my reading and then I was to write down the offending word on the paper. It worked out rather well and she had a blast of it. She has had a lot of practice with “I spy” the beginning sound of a word, some with the ending sound, but not so much of the middle sound. So in the beginning, she had a little trouble with the middle “a” sound words, but she caught up rather fast and we had fun. In the writing, there is a little squiggly “smiley” line above the letter “a”, that means that it’s a short vowel sound. Right now, Kamina only knows about the short vowel sounds of the vowels. We’ll introduce other vowel sounds later.

Then we proceeded with drawing and printing on the main lesson page just like the previous day. She wanted to take a lot more initiative today. She decided that she wanted to have green apples instead of red ones, and the stems a different color with the leaves brown and orange. She also decided that in her picture it was a girl instead of a boy who picked the apples. I allowed her to use stick crayons instead of block crayons to draw the girl figure as that is much easier for her and she had fun doing that. The trouble came when we started shading the white space of the picture. Even though I told her that we wanted to keep the background shading light so that it doesn’t overshadow the drawing, she insisted on shading as hard as she could and it rather overpowered her picture. I pointed out it to her, but she didn’t receive it too well. I let it drop, as it’s often the case with Kamina, she remembers what we say rather well after she sleeps on it even when she doesn’t appear to take in what we say on the spot. Then we wrote “The perfect apple” on the right side of the page, and in the middle of “perfect” she told me that she was tired and wanted to stop here. That sounded the alarm to me that I had been too much of a perfectionist in criticizing her writing, wanting every letter to be perfect. So we decided to take a snack break, and I told her that I was very proud of her and that she had been doing a splendid job drawing and writing. After that, she was in much better spirit and wanted to finish her writing. And the rest of the writing went much more pleasantly and smoothly, and her writing turned out quite well.

Lesson of the day: I should watch myself well and her reaction as well, so that we don’t burn out on things. I was also more capable of incorporating more things into the lesson as I’m settling into it more comfortably. Sometimes it’s hard to remember all the material and methods that I’ve studied and at my disposal. I think it’ll only get better and easier as we both get more used to it.

Skip Counting with Movement Game and Language Art Lesson 1, Day 4

8/25/11

Material used:

• Active Arithmetic by Henning Andersen
• 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

Raphen was cooking tonight, so I spent the time with Kamina outside. First she had a lot of fun being pushed on the swing, then I came up with this idea of a running and clapping game on the trampoline.

Our trampoline has a blue cross on the jumping mat to help the jumper stay in the middle. I stood at one of the four ends of the cross while Kamina ran around the outside edge of the trampoline (just inside of the blue protective cover), which she likes in general almost as much as jumping on the trampoline. She was to count up while she ran, starting with 1 at the end across from me, and 2 when she's next to me while clapping my hand, 3 at the end across from me, and 4 when she's next to me while clapping my hand, and so on. Every time after she clapped my hand, I wrote the number she just said on the ground with sidewalk chalk. One round of game is done when she counts up to 20. What I wrote on the ground are the even numbers from 2 to 20. Kamina had tremendous fun doing this, without realizing that she was in effect practicing skip counting by 2's. This is not the first skip counting game we've played. About a week ago, while we were out on a walk, we played another game that she absolutely loved. She has always loved to walk between me and Raphen holding our hands and having us pull her into the air and swing jump her. When she was obsessed with learning to count down, we had her count down from whatever number she was practicing, and "blast her off" when she counted down to 1. So this time, I slightly modified the "blast off" game. She was to count like normal from 1 onwards, and we "blast her off" on every even number. She loved to be swing jumped so much that we kept at it for a while. Then I bumped it up a notch telling her only to say the blast off numbers out loud. Almost immediately, she was able to do it without making any mistakes counting in 2s till 12 though with some hesitation before saying the larger numbers.

I can't take full credit for inventing these games, as I was mostly inspired by this great book "Active Arithmetic" by Henning Andersen. It describes the use of lively, rhythmic movement as part of the mathematics education. Clapping, stamping, walking, jumping, running and even full body movements are used to engage young children in learning arithmetic. Even though I usually have trouble reading most of the hard core Waldorf books, especially the ones that go way deep into the spiritual side of its philosophy, and are somewhat prejudiced against any other teaching methodologies, I really enjoyed reading this book. It might have something to do with the fact that I came from a rather mathematical background, and finds joy and truth in a lot of the things said in the book. However, I do believe that this sort of active learning is very beneficial to the child, especially a young one, in that they unconsciously learn some of the most fundamental parts of mathematics while enjoying the process. One drawback of the book is that it is written mostly for the classroom setting with a group of children of the usual size of 12 up to 24. As a result, most of the games cannot be directly employed when you only have a small number of children to work with. But so far my success with the little games that I improvised by adapting some of the games or principles described in the book gives me confidence that even with just one child, I can make it not only work but also fun.


After several rounds of the run and clap game, Kamina decided to do some sidewalk chalk drawing. This is the first time I saw her people drawing with distinct ten fingers and ten toes at the end of their limbs, though somewhat frighteningly long. Then she proceeded to write some letters on the ground. You can see her writing the three lower case letters we've been working on. While she wrote those letters, she was also telling herself the letter story for each of them. It's good to know that she's enjoying the letters so much that she's doing it on her own without being prompted, and that the information has been clearly retained.

At our normal job time, Kamina chose to continue the letter job we've been working on in the last few days. Today we focused on the lower case “c” and had a fun time. First, I told the story of “The cloud that cries” from The Lower Case Alphabet in Second Grade by Sofi Mandil (Age 10) & Kristie Burns. It’s a sweet little story about how the little pieces of mists try to comfort a cloud that cries by hugging and kissing him.

As I expected, Kamina rather liked it. Since when she was still a baby, she has always been attracted to stories where people turn from sad to happy. Then I showed her the chalkboard drawing of the story that I prepared earlier. Just like the drawing I had for the Water-Nixie, she absolutely loved it. We read the story together again while looking at the drawing, noting that both cloud and cry start with the happy letter “c”. To visually show this, the cloud in the picture has little “c” all over it, representing the little wisps of mist that are trying to make the cloud happy.

After that, we set out to copy the picture on Kamina’s main lesson page. We divided the paper into two sections, and copied the cloud picture on the left side. On the right side, we wrote “The cloud that cries”. I like the new addition of the colored border that we have this time around the page. With the border, Kamina had less trouble having her crayon sliding off the page and had better control of what she was drawing. She had fun drawing, had a little more trouble writing as we haven’t really practiced most of the letters. She learned to print most of the upper case letters at school, but hasn’t really worked on lower case letters.  So the writing took quite a bit of concentration on her part. At least the method I employed to correct writing mistakes let her stay in good spirit. She likes drawing flowers and butterflies around the letters that she wants to erase, and that reduces the stress over the mistakes. I also let her write upper cases instead of the proper lower cases where she wanted. However, by the end, she was still getting a little vexed, evidenced by the many mistakes she made in “cries”, particularly the letter “s” that she had a lot of trouble with. Hopefully, when we get more practice with running forms in our form drawing endeavor will help. I’m not too worried about it. It’s all that practice is about.

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?

Knobless Cylinders

8/4/11

Materials used:

• Knobless Cylinders
• Stockmar stick crayons
• Main lesson book paper (we used DRAWING PAPER 17.5in x 11.5in)

Today Kamina wanted to do knobless cylinders at her normal job time. It's one of the Montessori sensorial work materials. Sensorial is one of the most important areas in Montessori. It reflects one of Montessori's fundamental philosophy: children learn through multiple senses. Through vision, tactile, auditory, etc, senses, the children's learning experience is enriched, deepened, and as a result better integrated and remembered. This is in line with Waldorf's idea, though Waldorf puts much more emphasis on artistic and story exploration experience.

We started today's exercise with having Kamina grading the four boxes of cylinders on her own with me watching over. Then we figured out what the differences are between the different colored boxes, using proper adjectives describing different dimensions: tall, short, big, small, fat, thin, and their comparative forms.

Then I had this brilliant idea of writing these key words down on our main lesson pages. So I write the words down for the red and yellow boxes, and Kamina copied them. This is both for having some printing exercise, and having a record of the language we used for future reviewing. Kamina responded pretty well with the writing exercise. I had her draw the frame around the edges of the paper with block crayons first. Then drew lines with yellow crayon to form the golden path. This is an idea I got from Donna Simmons of the Christopherous curriculum. It gives a pretty guide of where the letters should walk on. When she makes a mistake or when she's not satisfied with what she wrote, I have her draw a flower or butterfly around the letter to be erased. This greatly amused her and as a consequence she didn't mind too much making mistakes. She has had some practice printing letters at school, mostly only upper case letters. Even though she's made plenty mistakes, I was impressed with what she was able to do, and her ability to concentrate and persevere. It would be interesting to see how she progresses when we get more practice in the near future. This is the first time I actively combine material and methods from different teaching philosophies together, and I consider it a success.