I have been having so much fun designing a curriculum for History, Geography, Math and Science that today I took a look at what else I wanted Z to learn and turned my creative inspiration to Writing.
Z does not really like writing yet. She will often shorten her sentences, taking out any "extra" prose so that she can get away with writing less. For example she might say "I found this beautiful purple flower today at the park." but she would try to write "I found a flower." and maybe tack on "at the park." But "beautiful" and "purple" aren't worth the effort.
But all it is really going to take is more practice. She needs to get more comfortable with a pencil.
So today I came up with my short term writing goals for Z. They are that she learns how to put together a coherent sentence and how to put her thoughts into writing. The first wont be too hard if she just writes the way she speaks, she speaks properly most of the time. The second is hard for some people, and may be hard for Z at first.
With those goals I decided that daily (or close to it) journaling is in order. But I don't think that Z is ready to keep a journal on her own, she just try to write a few short sentences to get it over with. So I am going to offer her some writing prompts. I have some of my own ideas but I am also going to use some from this website Journal Writing" Ideas/Prompts.
I also want her to do some copywork and I found this great list of short quotations that are also very thought provoking and are from figures all over the world and throughout time.
Z will also be doing some cross-curricular writing in geography, where she will be making a book about the United States.
As she gets more comfortable with writing I have some projects like writing a menu or a recipe, sending letters to the editor, working on poetry and her own story. But for now my plan is to have her write a little bit almost everyday to get into the habit and get comfortable with it, because I want those bigger projects to be fun and they won't be if she is still uncomfortable writing.
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K does the same thing - shortening beautiful sentences to make them easier to write :-( Sometimes I have her dictate to me, I write down the pretty sentence, and then I have her copy that in nice handwriting. I thought maybe breaking it into separate steps would help. She doesn't complain as much, and I'm hoping that eventually she will decide it is worth writing down her thought exactly the first time. Too early to tell yet ;-)
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