My older son came home from first grade yesterday and was not a happy camper. In his class, there is a discipline system of “warning, 5 minutes, 10 minutes”. What are the minutes for? Those are the minutes that are deducted from the kid’s recess time where they have to stay in the classroom when the other kids are out playing. Umm, yeah, this is the same school that sends notices home if your child has a certain BMI and is “at risk” of becoming overweight. Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? Sorry, I digress.
Anyway, my son had to move his clip to “warning” because his handwriting was too sloppy. He’s left-handed, has 2 parents with really bad handwriting and has some fine motor skill issues (this from his teacher’s mouth). So he gets a warning for his sloppy handwriting. We ran out to The Learning Source last night and got some pencil grips and a handwriting practice book. He is overlapping his thumb over his pointer finger, which is causing some of the control problems. And I addressed this “situation” with his teacher, who admits she might have been to hard on him but she’s trying to get the kids to write more neatly. I want my son to succeed and school and in life, but in a few years he’s going to be typing everything anyway, so I don’t think messy handwriting is the end of the world.
The second thing that he got back was a paper he needed to re-do with a note on the top “write more interesting sentences”. He was writing ones like, “I love ice cream.” “I like soccer.” “Boats sail a lot.” So together we talked about what would make more interesting sentences, and came up with ideas: What is your favorite flavor of ice cream? Do you like eating it in a cone or dish? Is it sticky? or Where do boats sail? Have you been on a boat? What did you do on it? Remember when your brother fell asleep in the cabin of a boat?
Even though this was an exercise to help a 6-year old, it’s something we all need to remember. What can you write so your sentences come alive? How can you paint a visual picture? How can you add more detail? How can you make the reader feel like she was with you on the boat? What did the salt air smell like? How big was that fish you saw in the water. People don’t think in words, they think in pictures. Don’t forget that.
Well, I’m off to make a capuccino. Not just any capuccino, but a homemade one–with Starbucks Italian coffee beans, (freshly ground) with hazelnut syrup, and topped with frothy 1% milk. Yummm.