The 3R's Part 2

K is a different child to T. He presents different challenges to our parenting. His attitude to  life in general, and learning particular things is very different to those of his older brother. This is apparent in how he is learning to read. He did not go to school, he was early in talking, he was never put into reading recovery, his journey to literacy will be much more 'natural' / unschooly than his elder brother. Having said that, he has witnessed his brother's outburst, and has learnt from this that reading is hard. He therefore does not want to have anything much to do with it. Furthermore, his overall disposition is one of encouraging others to do for him, rather than do for himself. As a result, he's not feeling any great incentive to attempt to read.

I have a secret weapon that is more effective with K than with T. K is passionate about games. Actually that's probably not entirely accurate. T is pretty passionate about games, K is more obsessed.

Christmas 2010 we purchased a nintendo DS game "Scribblenauts" with the intent of utilising K's passion for the DS, to encourage him to extend his awareness of the written word. We also strategically gifted this game to ourselves... knowing that K doesn't like "Little kids games" only "Grown up Games like Daddy plays". This strategy did not initially pan out as we had planned, largely due to the fact that in order to play fully you need to have a reasonable standard of literacy. This didn't phase K all that much, he was perfectly content to blithely go through the various 'levels' and hit random keys. The Game Designers had built in a feature where if it didn't recognise a word, it would offer a variety of options that may be somewhat similar to the letters randomly entered (or TM words like jedi). This was actually useful as a means to an end, K began to recognise and remember the first letters of words, find that letter on the qwerty keyboard of the DS screen, and was consequently able to find what he was looking for. In the sense that our goal had been to initiate and extend K's awareness of the written word, the Scribblenauts game did help achieve that goal. We did have some interesting exclamations from K such as "X-X-X spells axe", which led to a relevant tangent regarding spell-checkers, word recognition, pattern recognition, and similairties in words.

 K enjoys creating his own worlds and stories and games... any scenario where he is in full control and succesful. A few months ago, I suggested he could make his own stories. He would be the illustrator / narrator, and I would scribe for him. This pleased him. Here's one of his creations. I would guide his structure a little by asking clarification questions, and pointing out some minor tips about sequence, essentially I wrote what he dictated to me.

K's humans all have very short legs... clearly the legs are not yet a visually important factor, which surprises me considering how often he predominantly sees peoples legs, at his current stature.

Note my concientious effort to model making mistakes... and how to deal with them

Sir Tandy and hawkgagng are the main characters in the stories that Carl tells the boys in the evening. Hawkgang is a police guard dog in medeaval times.

Two weeks ago, he wanted to write a funny story for his friend's birthday. We used a process of spelling out each word on the magnetic board, and K would copy from the board. To ensure that there would be ample space for the story, he wrote the words before drawing the story. He then asked me to write the speech bubbles, because he couldn't write small enough to fit it all in. He's not reading yet, however he's prepared to take risks in creating stories and writing, as he has not had the same negative experiences as his brother.

When I asked K where the underwear were (I frequently rant about how children's books don't have illustrations that match the text) he laughed and with his finger underlined the word "underwear" stating "Here they are here Babsie!"