Not everything went well this morning, but B asked me not to blog about that part. So I get to write about the sunny part.
M was calm and happy all through his lessons, which involved spelling dictation, and things he didn’t understand. We started off with prayer. Then we moved to the ‘word wall’ of the Dolche list. It overlaps close enough with the early words of the W.I.S.E. guide, I printed it from the Jan Brett site. We love her illustrations. I put my arm around M, and asked him which letters he recognized. Then I told him the sounds of the other phono-grams in the words, letting him ‘glue’ them together. We’ve been taking turns reading this way in picture books too. The big thing was, no melt down, and it was easier on him to start off with telling me what he did know, not what he was having trouble with.
Then we went through the alphabet chart quickly (that lists letters both in bookface and cursive.) We worked through the dictation process, but not in his notebook. The spaces were too small, and that just added to the stress. We used a large sheet of lined paper, there were no tears today, and no flying pencils or erasers either.
For math, I wrote the problem out on the white board. Then we talked about it. M asked me to please slow down. He wanted time to count his fingers, without being told what to do. I told him that I wasn’t really interested in the answer, I wanted him to see how I went through the process. I did slow down though. Not having to fit his answers into the not -too -tiny but smaller than he’d like spots in his Miquon math sheets made him feel much, much better.
M did take to cursive writing very quickly, but he is having trouble recognizing the letters in bookface. I sort of wish I’d done printing with M like I did with B, but M’s handwriting is so much easier to read than B’s was too…I guess it’s a toss up on strategy.