I have received SO much from Marilyn. Because of her sacrificial ministry to me, I've wanted to give something back to her. When I first met her, she was concerned about her fingernails. As a professional, licensed nail tech, I saw an opportunity to bless her and have been doing her nails for the past several months. She will often bring something to bless the kids and we often discuss their learning processes.
One day, she helped me with the kids' writing which I blogged about here.
This simple instruction has made the world of difference in our table time and is what we discussed on the phone call.
When we started homeschooling, I used a VERY intense writing curriculum, then we moved into copywork and recently I was printing a photo and having the kids write three sentences about the photo. This turned out to be busy work so I stopped.
In its place, we are doing "real life writing"...mostly thank you notes since Christmas. I'm having the kids write a rough draft of the thank you and then copy that onto stationery. We've been focusing on doing their BEST WORK. Quality over quantity.
Marilyn guided me to proofread and correct their real life writing with a red pencil. She had me explain to the kids to expect the red pencil and it was a tool to HELP them and not to fear it. I am to not just leave them to write alone, but be in the process with them and take a detailed look at their work. I'm looking for proper letter formation (is this too high? is it round enough? is it well formed?). I'm looking for proper punctuation, grammar and spelling.
You can see a sample of Dan's writing before I started correcting and helping him and after we started with the red pencil. He grips his pencil so tight that his hand gets sore quickly so we've had discussions about how to help reduce the pain when writing.
In public school, the kids are expected to write creatively AND work on their handwriting at the same time starting very early. This is MADNESS and contributed to Daniel hating to write.
Next month, Marilyn will have me as a guest again and we'll discuss our progress. Stay tuned.
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