Writing

W wrote a substantial narration about Christopher Columbus the other day.  Written narrations are new for him.  Last year he did a couple of sentences every few months or so.  This time, after we read the chapter, I needed to pick up K, so I handed W a pencil and a notebook and told him to write down what he remembers - in order if possible.  When I got back I saw he had written 2/3 of a page.  That was really impressive.  And apart from some run-on sentences and spelling mistakes, the narration was pretty good.  Here's the edited version:

"What I remember is that a kid named Christopher Columbus read about Marco Polo and wanted to be just like him.  He wanted to get a ship and sail across the ocean to find a new land.  He went on a boat and went to a whole lot of places so somebody could help him with the money to buy a boat.  None of them wanted any part of it except one, the king and queen of Spain.  They offered to give him a lot of money and he was happy.  He bought three boats.  And that's it."

And that's as far as we read.  I was happy with that.  His reading comprehension is good.   This is the year we will get into writing.  We'll spend a lot of time on sentence structure, grammar, & spelling.  One written narration a week should be fine for now.  Then we'll go over it, make corrections, and he can write it over again - or even type it out.  Spelling this week was contractions (hasn't, they've, we're, I'll etc).  We're using a huge atlas during the AO readings to see what area something occurred, where someone was born, how far one city is from another, etc.  W gets more into the stories that way.  Math was big number addition and subtraction, including word problems.   I am all about review and solidifying those basics.

I'm looking forward to another great week.