Journal entry—lyrics on space

Last night Calvin turned the tables and sang his own bedtime song to Jon. It was somewhat of an improvisation, but then he also was able to repeat it pretty well, and remembered it again this morning, so that became his second journal for this week.

Journal entry—a story about exploring Antarctica

One of the suggestions in the Evan-Moor unit study (that I'm using rather loosely) was to write a story about how you might visit Antarctica. Calvin liked that suggestion, and it became one of this week's journal entries.

An Antarctica story

My favorite story of Calvin's as yet by far! I made this writing sheet to put in his language workbox (writing, reading, etc.). This was the first time I'd tried a writing activity like this with him. The only guidance I gave him was the sentence of instruction at the top. The composition and spelling are entirely his own (and come entirely from lots and lots of reading, and I suppose from keeping his journal, too).

"dars is an explorer. He went to Antarctica and watched the chinstrap penguins go to their nesting grounds on mount Erebus. He came to a high mountain. Then he heard a thundering and a rumbling soundof an avalanch. The noise broke through the sound of the wind. Snow and Ice started to fall from the mountain. It was an enormous avalanch. Then he watched Emperor penguins lay their egg. (transfer has to be quik). he watched the Emperor mother go to the sea to feed on kirll. (Krill are small srimp like animals). Then he got on the ship and went home. the end."

Writing stories

Calvin seemed to be getting bored with writing the "this is what I did today" journal entries. That was actually not what I had intended the journal to be anyhow. Although I do realize that it has little, if anything, to do with my intentions, I'd wanted the journal to be a chance for him to try out lots of different kinds of writing. So far he's used it to write about activities, about books he's read, and also to record stories he's heard, but he had yet to write stories of his own. We've talked about the important elements of a story with some of the Five in a Row books, and he tries his hand at oral story telling most nights with his dad before bed. Earlier this week when he said he didn't know what to write about I suggested that he give story writing a try. He liked his first try so much he wrote another one the day after.

Before and after journal entries—chronology

Just a couple of weeks ago I sat down and spent some time talking with Calvin about interesting and varied sentence structure. That went over pretty well, so when this week he wrote an entry with a Proustian sense of chronology I decided it was time to tackle that "language arts" subject as well. It's actually not a new subject for us—when he was younger we out story cards in order after reading books, and his entries summarizing the Oz books has been good practice as well—so our chat was a brief one.

After he'd written his entry I asked him a few questions about it. "Were the raccoon prints and mole hole part of the game? If all those things happened at the end during the game, what did you do during the actual program? Of course, having been at the event I understood where the time warp had happened in the act of writing about it. (You might also notice some missing letters. Those had been erased for handwriting purposes, to make sure that they were readable, but they never got rewritten because he wrote a second entry instead).

The  journal "re-entry" gained not only a smoother time line, but also a little more sentence variety and clarity, and improved handwriting. Sometimes I think it's just a matter of concentration.