Homeschooling in California

So far, my little kindergartner enjoys almost all the schoolwork we do together – except writing.  She also doesn’t care for art.  I didn’t know there were kids who didn’t like art, I thought that was one of universal things that kids just naturally like.  Not so.  Even as a toddler, she never wanted to scribble or color.  It just isn’t her thing.

I’ve been on the hunt for ways for her to practice writing her letters and numbers in a way that won’t make her hate writing even more.  Most of the projects I find online involve an art or craft project, so it’s been a challenge finding something else.

I’ve mostly tried to keep any writing time short.  Just a few minutes a day.  I’m trying to have faith that when she’s ready, she’ll write.  Doing it now isn’t vital.

Then our advisor recommended something.  She said to start big, and then get smaller later.  She suggested writing letters really big in sidewalk chalk, or with finger paints, etc. (There is no way my daughter would muss her hands in paint!)

Yesterday, we tried using our dry erase board.  I asked her to write her letters as big as she could.  She actually didn’t write them very big, but she loved writing on the big board.  What impressed me the most, aside from the fact that she really enjoyed writing, was that she only made one letter, the lower case ‘b’ backward.  She normally writes many of her letters backward.  When she’d gone through the whole alphabet, and I was planning to move on to another activity, she insisted in also writing all the numbers from 1 to 10.  That was the real proof to me that she was enjoying herself.

 I think we’ll be using the dry erase board a lot from now on!

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