Shakespeare portrait project

My own personal project for the year is to read and see more Shakespeare works. Since the kids share the same space as me, they have been caught in the tide. Mr 9 and Miss 7 and I decided to sit and copy one of the classic portraits of William Shakespeare. 

Droeshout portrait. An engraving by Martin Droeshout as frontispiece to the collected works of Shakespeare (the First Folio), printed in 1622 and published in 1623. (from Wikipedia)

We were aiming for a caricatured, fun impression. This is mine. I love the line drawings the kids did, but they are a bit shy about me putting their artwork online (which is a good thing!).

We wanted to have matching Shakespeare themed tshirts for a Shakespeare festival we were going to. Since buying was expensive and time consuming, we decided to design our own. 

The kids did two drawings each, so altogether we had five. I scanned the drawings into the computer. Then, I edited them in Picasa and put them into a photo collage. I then had five portraits in one file to send off to a tshirt printer. Our lovely local printer, Eco Shopper, printed our little batch of five shirts (extras for friends) on the same day. The photo below is used with the permission of Miss 7 and Mr 9.

It's a fun way to appropriate and display our artistic collaboration.  

A happy relationship with spelling

I have found two articles which are helping me make sense of teaching and learning spelling. I thought I'd share them, for the sake of those who are anxious about their child's spelling performance. It helps to look at the problem from other people's angles, to work out our own solutions.

Trevor Cairney's post outlines the developmental stages in spelling, along with several spelling strategies. I find it helpful to see the patterns of what is typical at different stages of development, so that I can be realistic and not create unnecessary angst. As always, his blog is a hub of useful links.

Misty Adoniou's post focuses on just one, the morphemic (meaning based), approach to teaching and learning spelling. She highlights that teaching spelling is more than testing lists.

In the very least, this reading confirms my conviction that learning skills in English is best done by spending lots of pleasant time with words, in many different forms, in the company of some more experienced English speakers.

It often feels that when we open a book with a child, the words become little creatures which behave in certain ways and which each have a story to tell.

Learning to empathise with new writers

I really want my kids to feel comfortable writing. There is something about writing which untangles thoughts. I can't think something through thoroughly without writing about it in some way. There is also the outwardness of writing. Words let us open our mind to others. Writing gives thoughts permanence.

But most of us don't start writing with ease. The more we write, the better writer we become. It takes practice and it takes time. Calm, unhurried time. Writing is driven along by purpose. None of these things can be fast tracked.

Writing is complex. Thoughts need to become words. Words need to be strung into sense. Sense needs to be knit into a sentence and another and another. The sentence needs to get through arms, hands and a pencil onto a page. The pencil needs to make marks on a page which make sense to someone else. There are a thousand rules, from the sounds which are formed when they combine in different ways, to the order which words ought to march in, to the punctuation which set the pace of those words.

And, when it is all new, it is hard to remember all the parts at once and by the time you get to the second word you have forgotten what you were trying to write in the first place and it is all very stressful and you know you have made a mistake so you will stop because this is not working and not fun and you are not sure why you have to write anyway when all you want to do is go and finish your cubby house in the lounge room.

Deep breath.

I had always assumed a child who is great with verbal language, and a ravenous reader, would love to write. At the same time, I imagined that a child who took more time to become a fluent speaker and reader would find writing more difficult. It's wonderful how often chlidren turn our assumptions upside down.

I have had to learn to slow down and study my kids when it comes to writing. I am learning where their writing stress points are. I am discovering which contexts and purposes generate a fruitful writing experience for each individual. When they are having a writing experience they feel good about, I need to make sure I don't fiddle with the delicate ecosystem the happily writing child is growing in.

It is precious to have a friendly relationship with writing. We're working on small goals so that it's not unnecessarily laborious. I would rather do a little bit of cheerful writing related work with children regularly, than a stressful slab. That way, it is more likely to become something they just do everyday, like reading and eating and brushing their teeth.

I have tried a few things which have been positive:

• Not tackling every aspect of writing at once. Treating skills separately. Handwriting. Typing. Composition.
• Choosing a favourite sentence from a favourite story and copying it.  While reading The Hobbit, riddles were favourite things to copy. We only did this once or twice a week for a couple of months. It was enough to help our son feel better about handwriting. It was a nice way to linger in well crafted phrases too.
• Sitting with a child as they narrated a story. I would write it down exactly as they spoke it, without corrections. This is good for children who are not yet reading or writing, but also for early writers. That way, hands don't have to keep pace with brain. Very fun for the scribe too!
• We would read back the narrated story on a different day. The child would notice irregular sentences. This introduced them to the concept of editing and drafting. It lets them approach their text as the author and the reader, scribbling all over a page as words are rearranged, removed and replaced. This is something Donald Graves was keen on.
• We have some story telling cards, which the kids would lay out (as many or as few as they wanted). They order the pictures to create their own plot. Then they would tell the story as they went.
• The three biggest kids began telling each other stories and recording them on video. This was fun. This allowed composition to happen away from the hand writing and conventions of written language. It also didn't require me to sit down and write.

Mostly, we are building our friendship with writing as we read a lot of great books. I'd love to hear writing experiences others have had!

"Children want to write"

I can't remember hearing about the late Donald Graves before. I found an old book about his Australian tour in 1980. Published in 1981, it's as old as me.

I resisted the urge to dismiss what looks out of date and found wonderful guidance and reassurance. It is helping me to mentor my kids into written communication in a way which doesn't kill their confidence or love for communication. You can read an article by Graves here. I have found the following observation to be true in my older children,

Very young children, ages 5 through 7, have very little difficulty choosing topics, especially if they write every day. As children grow older and experience the early effects of audience, even under favorable learning conditions, they begin to doubt what they know. From that point on, all writers go through a kind of doubting game about the texts they produce. They learn to read better and are more aware of the discrepancy between their texts and their actual intentions. If, however, overly severe, doubting teachers are added to the internal doubts of the child, writing becomes still more difficult. From here.

We often panic about the mechanics of writing (handwriting, punctuation, spelling, grammar) and hurry children through what could be a really rich learning process if we gave them time, space, freedom and encouragement. I will post in the near future about what I am doing to develop writing with my kids.

I was reading an interview with Donald Graves and like his response to this question. It sums up my teaching and learning aspiration; learning alongside my children.

Q: If you had to choose one thing teachers should do when teaching writing, what would it be?

Donald: Write yourself. Invite children to do something you're already doing. If you're not doing it, Hey, the kids say, I can't wait to grow up and not have to write, like you. They know. And for the short term and the long term, you'll be doing yourself a favor by writing. All of us need it as a survival tool in a very complex world. The wonderful thing about writing is that it separates the meaningless and the trivial from what is really important. So we need it for ourselves and then we need to invite children to do what we're doing. You can't ask someone to sing a duet with you until you know the tune yourself.

So, my first step in helping my kids grow into writing is to slow down and write myself.

Zines: Kids taking charge of their own writing

I hardly know a thing about zines. I was never cool. It's pronounced, "zeens", if you are as ignorant as me. Zines are little, independent, low budget, self-publications. A bit like a photocopied blog, from an era when blogs didn't exist. They can be about anything, usually combining images and text, and then run through a photocopier. Black and white mini magazines ready for an audience.

In trying to understand the zine, I found a handy little tutorial on how to make one from a single piece of paper. The idea is, you can do the layout of the entire zine on one page, whip it through the copier and fold into a booklet. It fits in an envelope, ready to post to all your eager, cool fans. Ours are micro, as I only had A4 paper. Click here for a complete tutorial.

image from experimentwithnature.com

It appears that children write best when they initiate and care about their own project. I have started folding a batch of zines so the kids can make up their own little publications. One child in particular is quite into it.

I wonder if we can make an Advent Calendar out of 25 zines...or maybe Christmas card zines?

An 8 year old's accidental history of weapons and warfare

Our 8 year old started archery classes earlier this year. Dozens of home ed kids have a class for an hour and a half each Tuesday. He had been desperate to learn for months. I had postponed the activity for some time, feeling like it was a bit obscure, and not really one of those essential life skills. But, it is so cheap and convenient, that I thought we could afford to have a go.

On the eve of starting, some friends (who also home educate and do archery) suggested he read the Ranger's Apprentice series, by John Flanaghan. So we found the first book and he started reading. He ploughed through them, and Steve set about trying to catch up, to 'supervise' the reading experience. The joy of reading races between father and son are the stuff of another post.

The boys eventually persuaded me to join in. Ranger's Apprentice is a real page turner. The first book starts like a fantasy, with some mythical creatures. As the series progresses, Flanaghan switches into a much more realistic mode. The settings are all fictionalised, but resemble the environments, races and cultures of Europe, North Africa, Asia and the British Isles.

It is set in a pseudo medieval time frame, but with post modern values and politically correct attitudes (and quite a few Australian idiosyncrasies). So, a whole lot of anachronisms really! The writing and descriptions become repetitive, but each plot and setting in the twelve part series is so different that I couldn't resist them.

The great thing about this reading experience was the ongoing conversations between Steve, the 8 year old and I about the books. Even the weaknesses were a catalyst for learning and developing our own thinking and writing.

One thing we all especially loved were the details and explanations about weaponry, training, tactics and strategy in warfare. Flanaghan managed to teach us a whole lot about real historical developments and technologies through a completely fictional world. It so happens that the bow and arrow are the primary weapon of a Ranger, so it has fitted beautifully around our new archery class.

Quite conveniently, last week, we enjoyed a morning with a medieval re-enactment group. Kez documented it here. It was fun to have all sorts of weapons, fighting and technologies demonstrated which were familiar to us from our reading. It added another dimension to our web of learning.

Then, we have jumped on YouTube to find more of the same. Here is a favourite.



Ranger's Apprentice has inspired some creativity. I'll share that later this week.