Tuesday, June 5, 2018

The Art of Expression

A lot of ideas look good on paper, but don't always work out the way you plan.  My plan for this camp was to saturate play with literacy, to the extent the pressure of being literate at a certain level, would disappear.  How thankful am I that we seem to be pulling it off.
My happy campers made a little camping scene during snack today.  I intended it to go home, but it appeared that many of them were eaten between the house and the car.  One works up an appetite running through the woods.
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The demands the state puts on our littlest people causes me some serious stress. Clearly, or I wouldn't be spending my summer trying it another way.  Still, working in the upper grades, even I forget how able these kids are to express themselves in speaking and illustrating.  Their intelligences show in a myriad of ways. 
Take a look-
This is from our youngest camper (just four), who spent the whole writing time sharing a very big and wild story with his sweet camp counselor, while she transcribed. This little one has had very limited experience with any screen time and no video games of any sort.  What is it with boys and ninjas and battles?
The next set of pictures reveal a lot of important things and a lot of hard work by the writers.  These two pictures are of work done by our post- pre-k set.  Illustrations provide a window of reading readiness. When a child starts adding details like a crown and buttons, etc. you can know they are developmentally ready to read.  I know from her Mom that her favorite part of camp is the woods hike.  We look for animal tracks.  This is a princess who found a cat.  Her story talks about the princess walking in the woods and finding animals.
I fixed this picture, but here it is turned again- boo hiss.

Again, this little guy is ready to read.  See the inside of the polar bears ears.  He is writing his story based on a book he read during research time.  I love that he has a title- wow. 
 

Let's move to post kindergarten.  I sat down to work with this wee turtle lover, again noticing all the details he was giving his picture.   I asked him if he'd like for me to write while he told me his ideas .  He rattled this off to me, hardly without a break.  Getting from this spot of having a head full of ideas, to the mental and physical demand of putting it on paper is often just way too much for a busy mind and a busy body.  Still, obviously the the whole piece is there. He dictated this to me yesterday, then read it to his camp counselor today. 


Then you go to first grade and find out that you start with a capital, end with punctuation, capitalize proper nouns, etc, etc.  So what do you do?  You condense your amazing story into a very small one since it takes so much to keep all that in mind.  Oy vey.

What a great job remembering everything she needed. 

Sometimes, kids take to cursive and it gives them speed. Then they can get their thoughts down in a reasonable amount of time.  If your kiddo can write in cursive, I would encourage you to have them write something everyday. It is so important to develop that hand strength and all the better if they have a real reason to write, like to you, or a grandparent, or their camp counselor, who is writing to them.


All this to say, having great thoughts is not hard for little children. Being expected to write all those thoughts down is very challenging. 
Another day of beautiful play- all praise to our heavenly Father.
Tomorrow, we're off to the creek!




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