telling stories

I always feel challenged with the First Grade letter stories. While Sophine and I love a good fairy tale, bringing the story with drawing and then writing letters, can easily feel like you are applying a formula. I find it much easier to throw together a fun math block, than to figure out creative ways with letter stories.

So since Sophine is itching to learn how to write, and I'm itching to take a break from letter stories, I have decided that for the next two to four weeks we are doing a block on story telling. This will allow me to bring more stories in more creative ways (pictures, paintings, table top stories, puppet plays etc.) , and it will allow Sophine to indulge in writing, as long as she is driving that particular effort. I am not at this point willing to have a formal "writing block" because it's not really age appropriate yet. Then again, who am I to stop my child from learning something she is highly interested in? So she writes, but I'm not telling her to. Another wonderful homeschooling compromise is born!

Today we began our block with a HABA game. It consists of little cards with pictures, and we drew random cards and turned all the pictures into a story. First I made up a long story that involved a princess, and old lady, a key, a scroll and a boy with a broken balloon. Next we had cards depicting a crown, a town, and a frog with a crown on his head. This soon became the story of a crown in search of a rightful king, who turned out to be a frog. Finally, Sophine drew a card of a mill and a dog. She told me a very simple story, then decided to write it all by herself. Here is the finished product:

For those of you less experienced with inventive spelling, it reads "Once upon a time there was an old mill and in that mill lived a funny dog and that dog loved to do silly tricks."

Interestingly, Sophine did not think that it was a silly trick for the dog to carry a basket on its back. It quickly became clear that there is more to this story, as she declared "But that dog is going shopping at the market, mom!" Well, duh, should've known! I do like her dog though.

In other news, she is convinced that she saw a fairy in a raindrop today. I think we can call it a successful day, as we also did Form Drawing, circle and recorder. Next week we plan to bring a story she's been working on to life with beeswax. It's going to be fun!