Today's Fun Friday post is brought to you by the letters C, a, r, s, t, e & n! One of Carsten's goals when he turned 5 was to learn to write his name. Before this he would attempt, but get frustrated and not be interested in all at sitting down to learn how. But now he is 5, and it was a big deal to him. (friends in Sunday School all write their own name on their papers!)
I had seen a neat chart for a girl learning to write her name that had a picture of a balloon with a letter of her name in each balloon and she colored one in when she learned how to write it. That was something I had not thought of - teach him one letter at a time. And this turned out to be a great strategy as Carsten is fairly long and has some tricky letters to learn. So Carst sat down at the computer with me and we made a chart for him:
We were trying to think of a good prize for when he finished his goal, and I was trying to steer away from his suggestions of toys, but he didn't like my suggestion of ice cream (whose son is he?!!), and then he pointed at the screen and said: "HOW ABOUT A BALLOON FROM THE DOLLAR STORE?!" perfect.
Carsten hung his chart up under his all important tractor calendar in the sun room
and we started. I printed out tracing worksheets from
this site, and we
worked on one or two letters a day. He would write the letters on his
calendar that we worked on.
And Friday he decided that the last 3 letters were going to be easy and he wanted to finish his name and get balloons for everyone for fun friday. (since I didn't have a better plan I was all for it!!! =) He finished the tracing sheets for t, e, & n, and then I printed out his name from the
Amazing Handwriting Worksheet Maker and told him this was his "test." =)
He passed! I am so proud of him - he went from not writing his name at all to getting it down in way less than a month. He was SUPER proud as well.
(this kept Henry busy while we were working on it! =)
Carsten colored in his last balloon, and we made plans to go to the dollar store after we picked up Grace and Willem from school.
I was planning on taking everyone grocery shopping first, but then we got a kind invite from our friends the DY's to bring the kids over after school and join them for pizza. Carsten said he would rather do this and we could get balloons the next morning.
And we did!
Balloons are a GREAT prize for my name-writing-super-big-five-year-old, and a GREAT fun inside distraction for all the kids from all the cold outside...
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