Today is…Tuesday May 31
We started out Speedbiking around the yard, but I had to haul them back in to get a baby to sleep.
I lured them in with snacks.
Ants on a log!
Except, the celery was rather dry. So we dipped sliced apples in the peanut butter and raisins we’d used to decorate our logs. Plus, I even did a story/lesson on the grasshopper and the ant…
…which inspired Giant to write his own story about an ant and his friend.
He wrote and finished the first page by himself (no prompting or help from me. He just grabbed some paper and a pencil during snack and started writing 🙂 ) :
[Once upon a time there was a little ant and friend bird]
I encouraged him to keep going and he became frustrated.
What to do? – Insist he finishes to teach persisitance? -Let him write whenever the mood strikes him? Write it for him so he can see how cool a finished book looks? – Have him draw pictures if the writing gets too tough? – Act as his scribe? —These questions are somehow more important when one is teaching their own child than a classroom full of children. You feel for your own child more…you feel their frustration more and you also feel like you can push them more. Which makes the decision of what to do that much harder!
I chose a solution which used several of my options. I had him draw a picture of what happened next, acted as scribe for his words, and had him write down the odd word here and there…
[They(Th e ey) had a picnic and played in the garden (GRdin)]
[A monster came. They found a big long sword their dad had used for a long time. It was magic (majik)]
[Then the ant’s friend Bird remembered something his dad had said. The monster was magic and nice and powerful (POWrFL). They became friends (FrEinz) ]
The End
The boys spent a lot of time reading in the morning, too:
