One O’clock Letters
The second grade small group is learning to write in cursive. Most of the letters they have learned so far have been formed in similar ways, so they have not been too difficult for the students to master. We have simple stories that keep the letter formation in the student’s minds. For example, the “1:00 letters” are all formed by starting at the line, following an imaginary clock face around to where 1:00 would be, then realizing they “forgot their lunch,” so retrace their arc back, come underneath to “rejoin the class,” then “end with a smile,” because it is lunch time. This little story helps the students remember which direction their pencil should be heading, and where it is going next. It makes them smile, and covers the letters a, c, d, g, o, and q. I get a lot of mileage out of the one o’clock story!
Friday found the second grade small group struggling to master the cursive letter f. It is not really like other letters, and has some new and different curves. We wrote it using big airplane writing movements. Then using fingertips we traced it on the table and on our wrist. Then it was time to put pencil to paper and write practice rows of the letter. For most of the group practice paid off, and a few lines into the exercise they had the pencil strokes down and were writing legible letter f’s.
This is hard! It needs a story.
A couple of my students seem to struggle with the task of forming letters correctly, whether it is a printed letter they have been forming for years or a brand new cursive one. Eric is one of those students, and he was frustrated with trying to remember the direction his pencil needed to flow to make the letter f. “We need a story to go along with this letter,” he suggested. “A story to help our pencils know where to go.”
Not having a story for f in mind, I suggested we work on one together. This is our story for helping form the letter f.
You are going out to play, and you come out of your room and up the stairs. Your mom calls to you just as you get at the door to outside. “Please go down to the basement for me before you go to play.” So you loop around and go back down the stairs and down to the basement. You get what she needed, then loop back up. Your mom meets you at the top of the basement stairs, you hand her what she sent you to get, and you go outside with a smile.
But what does Mom need you to get?
The story has all the elements needed to guide the students to make a letter f. But I work with an intelligent and curious crew of students, and they were not satisfied with the lack of detail in our story. What Mom wanted from the basement seemed to be the crucial detail lacking in our story. Basements are rare in our part of the country, and none of us have one in our houses. I grew up on a midwestern farm with a basement, so I filled in the story by telling them that when I was their age, my mom would send me to the basement to get carrots that were stored in buckets of sand to keep them fresh through the winter. Adding a bit more detail than I intended to, I recalled once when Mom sent me down to get carrots, and while digging around in the sand for carrots, I accidentally grabbed a toad that was hibernating in the sand. My students giggled as I told them I was sure it made me scream to be holding a toad when I expected a carrot.
That detail made the story come alive for Eric. “Cool!” he said. “Now that is a story that will help my pencil make this hard letter!” He softly murmured to himself as his pencil went past the baseline, “This is where Mrs. Hall grabs a toad, she screams, and runs up the stairs and out the door.”
Amazing, the power of a good story.
Tales from the Dyslexia Center 