Today was as good a day, as yesterday was a bad day.
Yesterday was Spelling day for Samuel. Lots of pain (for both him and me) went into preparing him for it. Yet he came home disappointed and discouraged.
“I don’t know (the words). All my friends know, but I don’t know. All my friends are so fast, and I am so slow. I don’t like Spelling. I don’t want to try. I want to give up. I don’t want to try.”
I don’t need to describe how I felt. I don’t have the words anyway.
But that night, I found Michelle at Delightful Learning. So I decided, that I shall restart, and try again. I shall go back to what I believed at first – to let the child learn when he is ready.
(Actually, although I have been reading to him and teaching him to read, it was only quite recently that Samuel showed readiness to read. I started to find him flipping through books on his own, pretending to read. He would also get terribly excited at hearing me read familiar words, i.e. words on his Spelling list, or his Peter and Jane book).
It is indeed true, that when we change, everything changes. For us, it happened literally overnight.
This morning, at breakfast, Samuel asked me – what is “Shallow”? So with a renewed mind, an inspiration struck me.
I took out a plate, and a bowl, filled them up with water, wrote the words “Deep” and “Shallow” and labeled the plate and the bowl.
I also went to search for a lego man to put into the plate/bowl to further illustrate the point. Samuel responded excitedly and immediately. He directed me to where I could find another lego “big man”, so we ended up with two lego men.
I decided that I could also teach him “big”, “small” and “man.”, so I proceeded to label the lego men too.
After I have written “Big man” and “Small man”, with the post-it, he took the post-it from me, and copied “Bigman” and “Smallman” into two new post-its.
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| Samuel, spontaneously, diligently at work |
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| He wrote them so well! |
He arranged those two words on our “stage”.
Soon after, he asked me how to spell “Same time” and he wrote those words too, and again placed the words on our “stage”. (I will post the
story tomorrow. When you read it, you would understand his thinking behind the “same time”).
Later in the afternoon, Samuel and I wrote out a story about the two men. In fact, this afternoon, we wrote out three stories.
After I have finished each of the story, Samuel spontaneously gave me a big, tight hug.
Samuel does not have the words for it, but I know what each of the hug meant. It meant “I love you mum. Thank you for writing the story with me. I like it”.
His little gestures delighted my heart. They delighted me not because I enjoyed those hugs (although I did enjoy them, very much), but because I knew, that what we did together today, according to his desires, following his leading, allowing the expression of his own creativity, delighted his little heart.
I know this has nothing to do with your post at all but I noticed that your son writes with his left hand. I assumed that you’re right-handed? Has it been difficult then, teaching him how to write? My boy seems to be left-handed, so I’ve been thinking about this matter as he will soon come to the stage of learning how to write. Any advice?
Hi Ruth
Yes, I am right handed. Well, generally he has some difficulty learning to write but I don’t think it is because he is left handed. It might be easier for your child.
However, writing with left hand has its difficulty – the strokes are not as natural, e.g. he tends to write his “ticks” in a mirror image from the normal tick, because it is more 顺 for him. I took some time to correct him on that, and even now, after 2 years, he sometimes still makes mistakes. Again, your child might learn faster.
He also tends to get his 笔划 wrong because again, it is less 顺 for a left handed person. E.g. for “T”, he would write the “-” from right to left instead of left to right. I think it is more natural for left handed people to write from left to right, but unfortunately, the rest of the world operates opposite from their natural preference.
It is not so much of a problem for english, but more so for Chinese, because in Chinese, the 笔划 is much more important.
I also find that it is more difficult for him to see what he is writing, since his hand is covering it.
Left-handed people would tell you that they are doing fine. I believe that Samuel will eventually do fine too, even with his 笔划 wrong, because they will find ways to compensate. But the process of getting him there, will be longer and more tedious than others.
I have a second born who started preferring using his left hand to write, but at that time I was working, so my mother corrected him to use his right hand. With Samuel, he showed a preference with his left hand, and we did not correct him. As it is, he was not writing very well and we did not want to add stress on him on getting him to write with his right hand.
When he was just 4, we did try to change him to using his right hand, but it was so difficult for him, we gave up. We couldnt bear seeing him relearn something which was already so difficult for him in the first place.
To complicate matters, my second born has really bad handwriting. I always wonder whether if we had let him continue using his left hand, he would write better. Another mystery is that his handwriting was actually much better when he was 8, than he was 10, it just got worse and worse. I am still trying to figure that one out…
Sorry if my story confuses you further, but that’s all I can share 🙂
Thanks for all the sharing! My hubby and I decided to just let him use whichever hand he is naturally inclined to, we will not try to change him to be right-handed as I think God has designed each of us and our natural inclination with a special reason 🙂 Just that I’m worried I won’t be able to teach him writing properly since I don’t write with my left hand and may not understand well his challenges. Praying for lots of wisdom!