Wow! Today, a little guy in my room simply blew me away! I decided during small group time to casually introduce a few letters with the wood pieces from Handwriting without Tears to him.
I wasn't really expecting him to show much interest. I figured we'd just explore the wood pieces, introduce the letter E and then make a few shapes with the wood pieces.
Well, he did seem interested and engaged and said "my name". Now, his name doesn't start with an "E", but I was encouraged by the fact that he associated the letter making with letters in general and his name!
He then, spontaneously, turned around and pointed to the labels on the shelf behind him and said "letter E"..."letter E", to each word.
Well, I just about fell over the first time; since he actually HAD pointed to a letter E! I think that was probably random since after that he was clearly pointing to the words.
How impressive is that though! He knew that all of those words had letters in them...just like the letter E is a letter! And he generalized this knowledge and could verbalize that these were letters!
So, I introduced some paper and showed him how I wrote the letter J (which is the first letter of his name) with a highlighter. I handed him a crayon and with some help he traced over the letter. He was ecstatic!! He kept saying "my name", "my name"! We repeated this several times. Each time he was more excited than the first!
I think we have another pre-writer on our hands! Definitely going under: "Greatest anecdotal note of the day!" :)
I wasn't really expecting him to show much interest. I figured we'd just explore the wood pieces, introduce the letter E and then make a few shapes with the wood pieces.
Well, he did seem interested and engaged and said "my name". Now, his name doesn't start with an "E", but I was encouraged by the fact that he associated the letter making with letters in general and his name!
He then, spontaneously, turned around and pointed to the labels on the shelf behind him and said "letter E"..."letter E", to each word.
Well, I just about fell over the first time; since he actually HAD pointed to a letter E! I think that was probably random since after that he was clearly pointing to the words.
How impressive is that though! He knew that all of those words had letters in them...just like the letter E is a letter! And he generalized this knowledge and could verbalize that these were letters!
So, I introduced some paper and showed him how I wrote the letter J (which is the first letter of his name) with a highlighter. I handed him a crayon and with some help he traced over the letter. He was ecstatic!! He kept saying "my name", "my name"! We repeated this several times. Each time he was more excited than the first!
I think we have another pre-writer on our hands! Definitely going under: "Greatest anecdotal note of the day!" :)
What a great story! We use HWT in our integrated preschool program, also, and it's amazing to see the kids make a connection! :) Congrats on a victory!
ReplyDelete@Elizabeth- what makes this even more exciting is that this little guy started in my room less than a year ago with almost no language at all! :)
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