As you may have read before, Kenyon and Jacinta have several writing assignments this year. Up to this point, they have not been all that excited about that. I am convinced that they will
develop a love of writing. They are already doing better and beginning to enjoy letting their own creativity flow. We have a great time making up and talking about the stories. We laugh and giggle as we each add our own silly parts to each new story. Now Kenyon and Jacinta are working on getting those thoughts onto paper, keeping their thoughts going to create a whole story instead of just a sentence or two.
This week I gave
Keslee and
Kalysa their own spiral notebooks just for school. I have written math problems and memory verses and personal information for them to copy. They were so excited to have their own spiral.
Keslee finished all the pages I had prepared for her and then asked if she could write a story. I set her down with a word list from one of her workbooks and she wrote her first, and second story.
Her story: Once a girl was lost in the woods with no trees with Bananas. What would she do? All a suddenly she found a bus stop. All a sudden a people. WHAT?
I loved it! She explained that being in the woods with no trees with bananas meant that she had no food. Of course, what would a girl do with no bananas? Good thing she found that bus stop full of people! Keslee then decided to write her second story. Since the first one was so serious she decided to go a little silly with this one.
2nd story: Once a boy and a girl was home picking their nose. Only the boy. Then their mom came.
She makes me laugh. In case you missed it, the boy is the only one picking his nose, a girl would never do that. She had so much fun writing her stories and even more fun reading them and explaining everything that she is not yet able to put into words on paper. I am so thankful that she was not in public school long enough to get the love of learning sucked out of her. It is so wonderful to see my little girls have so much joy even in "school time." I am so saddened by the fact that my son no longer has that same joy. We have our moments when he is having so much fun learning that he forgets we are doing school. I wish our days were filled with more of those moments for him. I pray that I did not keep him "institutionalized" to long for us to get that back for him. I will do whatever I can to ensure that my girls do not loose it and that my son will someday find it again.
I love homeschooling!!
We used this chart from our book Ancient Egypt as a guide. 
The writings we saw pictured in the book all were written from top to bottom instead of left to right like we are accustomed to. This is K*E*N*Y*O*N.
The chart does not show a picture for the letter J or the letter S. Since J and H make the same sounds in several languages, we decided Jacinta would use and H and then use and S for the C. J(H)*A*C(S)*I*N*T*A. She was really nervous about having to draw birds for the letter A, especially when I pointed out that she had 2 A's in her name, but I thought she did great. She did, however, discover one of the problems I am sure the Egyptian's encountered often-having the space to write the complete word. She made her first A way to big but was able to salvage the picture by scaling down for the remaining letters. 
