The Kindergartener Writes

Before Christmas The Banana’s teacher asked her to write a story for the Young Author’s Conference.  The Banana came home and went right to work at the kitchen table in the middle of all the evening craziness and wrote this wonderful story with a beginning, middle and end.  For those who might not want to wade through the phonetic spelling (which I greatly treasure) here is a conventional translation:

There was a princess.  She had no shoes.  The princess was named Lexie.

“I do not know what to do!  I do not have shoes or socks!  What shall I do?  I will get my cell phone.  What’s that?”

“It’s me!  A real fairy!”

“Huh?”

“It’s a fairy, a real, real fairy!  I have shoes in my wand.  I will give them to you.  I hope that you like them!”  

“I like them!”

Leave it to The Banana to incorporate shoes and a cell phone into her story!  It still makes me smile.

The Banana is learning to read in such a different way than her older brother and sister.  First of all, she rarely gets frustrated and simply doesn’t get angry about learning to read.  Learning to read is hard work, but she wants to do it, so she buckles down and tries hard.  It’s one of the qualities of The Banana that I love most, a willingness to work hard when things are difficult.  I know that will serve her well for the rest of her life.  Second of all, more than YaYa and especially Mr. SP, who was a quick memorizer when he was learning to read, The Banana is the kind of reader who really stops to sound out all the tricky words.  She sounds out things often as she reads, and when things don’t look like they sound, that gets tricky.  But it makes sense that those words would be tricky.  A by-product of all of this sounding out is that The Banana has no hesitation to use phonetic spelling when she writes, and not knowing how to spell something doesn’t throw her emergent writing off or upset her like it did for her older brother and sister.

I don’t often get to see very much of The Banana’s writing, or do writing with The Banana (although I’m going to try to do more of it with her) partly because my after school hours are insanely crazy and chaotic beyond all measure, and partly because The Banana does not like to go off to do writing by herself.  She doesn’t like to do anything by herself.  If she can be next to you while you are writing, she likes to write.  Knowing that means I need to change things up a little around here so she and I can have some independent writing time together.  I think we will enjoy ourselves.