Beginning Writing...

Fellow teachers will understand my excitement from these photos.  Last summer, Jack and I tackled the big "learning to read."  It is something he picked up rather quickly given the task, and something he still continues to surprise me with everyday.  Writing however, has not been a particular area of interest for him.  A few months ago though, I began to notice him starting to add letters to the pictures he would draw.  I've had some field experience interpreting writing, but I couldn't make these out without his help and many times the letters did not match the sounds.  Lately though, he's been leaving me little "notes" to tell me things (see photo #1).  I loved this note, it says "My tummy hurts (and the heart means I love you)."  Phonetically, it makes perfect sense and I am so excited about it!!  The second photo is writing we did together.  He placed stickers on the top of the paper to make a picture and wrote a sentence to describe it.  We used this to talk about spacing, capital/lowercase letters, putting the vowels in our words, etc.. Clearly a "light bulb" is going off and I am so excited that things are starting to connect!  Go Jack!!