Getting It All In Writing
that has the large blank space at the top for your little one to draw a picture on. Then you can have him sit on your lap, while he tells you about the picture, and you can write on the lines below everything he tells you. When he is done, usually about four sentences later, you can read it back to him. I have never seen this to fail to intrigue a child.
It is important to introduce music at these ages, because music gives children the lessons of cadence that are not easy to teach. It is equally important to keep the child physically active, because this improves blood flow to the brain, increasing creativity. It is also important to provide experiences, so that the young author has something to write about. It is important to both the young reader and the young writer to learn to balance (as in balance beam) because this helps to co-ordinate the eyes with the physical body, and gets the eyes to be able to follow a path, important to reading and writing.
At about age five, the child is ready to begin writing alone. Of course, this is not nearly as much fun as writing as a group, so it is better to write or tell stories in round-robin fashion. This is an old, old game, where one child begins a story and the next adds on and so on and so on until there is a huge, elaborate tale to tell. Even more fun, record it and play it back when they are done. These are fun to take out and listen to again many years down the road, when the storytellers are telling their own children stories. These can also help to create more elaborate stories by taking out the tape and reviewing it a week later, and asking how that phrase could have been more clear, or how did the Princess's hair look after she had been growing it for seven centuries?
You will notice that I place little emphasis on naming the parts of language, i.e. nouns, verbs, etc. Of course, for operating in the world outside of homeschool, it may at some point be useful to be able to tell a noun from a verb, so we do some review of those things. For the most part, we concentrate on purely what the development of language is all
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