ABC’s

I used to be a teacher.  Have I mentioned that before?  Maybe that’s becoming the blue tuxedo of stories: my days of glory when I’d stand in front of a crowd of lip glossed or Axe wearing adolescents and make them forget their troubles using only my words.

Ehem.

Recently, I’ve been able to dust off my teaching skills because Hadley has decided she wants to write stories.  This happened under no suggestion on my part, people.  I was just sitting at the kitchen table one afternoon minding my own business when Hadley asked, “Mama?  Can I use the computer to write a story?”

So I hooked her up.

There’s not much I know about motherhood.  I pretty much wing it and make a mess of things until I go to bed saying, “Well, I won’t be doing that tomorrow.”  But helping a child with her words?  Look out.

Hadley wanted to know how to “stop these words so I can get a capital letter again.”  I went to see what she was talking about, and understood that she needed to put a period at the end of her sentence.  I explained that to her and then showed her how it was done in several of her books.  We took a look at Bink and Gollie, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, Franklin Makes a New Friend.

“See, Hadley?  These are called ‘sentences.’  When you finish a sentence, you put down a period.”

“Got it, Mama.”

(What? You don’t think what I just showed you was BRILLIANT?  That would’ve gotten a gold star if I was being observed by my administrator: uses good literature to teach punctuation.)

“Well, what are you going to write next?”

“I don’t know.  I have to think.”

In other words, go away.

 

She wanted to know how to spell words, and so I made her her own personal dictionary.  Every time she asks how to spell a word, I write it down in a spiral bound notebook.  We devote one letter per page so she can flip easily and look up the words she has already used.  She loves it.

She spent two hours working on a story titled The Bee, Witch, and Superhero.

It goes like this:

Hadley harper maya Sydney sophie mom dad ran away from a bee.  But a superhero came and rescued them from the bee.

But a witch came and turned the superhero into stone.

but the bee was turned to stone to.

But the witch thought that she didn’t have to cast anymore spells on people so she went home.

And when she got home she opened her covers and saw a pot of honey.

It’s the stuff of a Newberry award, no?

Go on, girl.

At one point, Hadley asked me how to spell the word, “will.” (She must’ve deleted that out in her final revisions.)  She tells me, “Not my friend Will, the other will.”

“W-I-L-L.  Actually my friend will is spelled the same way.”

“You have a friend named Will?  Does he live around here?”

“No, I don’t have a friend named Will.  I was trying to say that the name Will is spelled the same as the word ‘will.'”

“Did you ever have a friend named Will?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It would be sad if you did and you can’t remember it.”

This is true.

Harper’s into letters, too.  She’s busy working on an alphabet puzzle these days.

It frustrates her to no end.  She doesn’t understand that you need to match the “big” letters with the “small” letters.  After about three tries she slams her head on the ground and starts to cry.

There’s drama all over this house.  We got one girl writing about bees (horrifying, if you ask me) and another one causing herself bodily harm because she can’t get the letters right.

Ironically, the current essay I’m working on has to do with bees.  And I think Jesse would observe (ever so gently, of course) that I act a bit like Harper when I can’t get my letters to do what I want.