Handwriting

So Andrea was talking about what she did for Handwriting. I thought I'd share what we do. We are using Handwriting Without Tears.. 

But. That's not what this post is about. We also do what I call "journals." Each day they have to draw a picture in their book about something that happened, or anything else they want to draw a picture about. Then they have to write a sentence trying to spell each word themselves. Then I write it the correct way. And then they re-write it correctly. It's helped my girls become a lot more cautious about their writing, and they try a lot harder to get it right the first time and make it neat. If they get it right the first time, they don't need to re-write it.  Here are some examples from our first few entries:

                                (Appletree is a place.. she wasn't talking about apple trees)

The Very Last Page!

I think I've mentioned this before, but in case I haven't--we started The Boy's kindergarten "school year" in March. Because we could, that's why! That's really the only reason.

And now, as we're rounding the final corner toward finishing up this school year, I've noticed that we're not at all in the same place in every subject. We still have a ton of lessons left in The Boy's math program, and we just bought and started an Explode the Code workbook. I'm pretty sure that we won't finish either of those by March.

But that's okay, and it's one of those cool things about homeschooling. I don't feel any pressure to keep our subjects perfectly lined up. Last March, I planned things out so that we'd finish everything at the same time, but I knew life would happen and our schedule wouldn't go perfectly. We just needed a plan to start out with.

Anyway, I'm getting off track here. The point of this post is that The Boy did the very last page of his handwriting workbook today--that means we actually finished one subject early! And we didn't even do handwriting every day. A Reason for Handwriting K only has 80-ish lessons, so finishing by the end of the year wasn't hard. Heh.

It feels weird, though, with this being our first official year and having finished our first workbook. (The Boy likes workbooks. A lot.) It's like the beginning of the end...of the beginning...hmm. Yeah, that sounded better in my head. But it's a weird feeling, even if I can't express it very well.

For the next few weeks, I'm going to make up some handwriting worksheets. Probably with sentences from whatever read-aloud we're reading from. That's an idea that I saw...somewhere...anyway, I didn't come up with it myself. But I think The Boy will like it.

For next "year," I'm not sure what we're going to do for handwriting yet. I don't think I want to continue with A Reason for Handwriting--I'm not really into using Bible verses for handwriting. (If you are, though, that's perfectly fine with me.) Anyone have a handwriting workbook or program that they like?

Tracing...Kind Of

So, continuing with scaling back on the writing activities--this is another activity that I've seen in lots of places. I can't really give credit to just one source.

I printed out some BIG letters for Little Boy to "trace"--but since he's kind of over tracing with a pen, we've been using little manipulatives to trace the big letters. So it's also a fine-motor activity, yay!

Anyway, here Little Boy's using Craisins to "trace" an upper-case A. We've also used beads and goldfish crackers. I think we might do marshmallows or chocolate chips next--he likes being able to snack on his schoolwork. And really, who can blame him?

Name Writing

I thought it might be fun for Little Boy to learn to write his name. I'm not really concerned about writing the rest of the alphabet right now, but writing his name is a nice party trick, right?

We started with the first letter:


{His name starts with E.}

He did better with E than I thought he would. And he does like it. I taught him the next letter in his name, and he said, "Ohh, let me try the uppercase too!"

So I'm glad he's enjoying it. We've done about half the letters in his name so far, and it's sort of legible. Kinda. LOL We've still got a loooong way to go.