Thank You, Lucy Calkins!

If you're an educator, especially an elementary teacher, you're probably familiar with Lucy Calkins. I've been trained on a lot of writing programs in my career but I've always stuck to Calkin's program because it works.  I wish I had the time and patience to do more with Imma because she responds to it very well.  Tonight for her homework, she was to read her library book and then draw a picture of her favorite part.  We did that but I asked her to write a sentence, too.  The book was about training a dog to do tricks.  She said her favorite part was when they taught the dog to sit. She drew a picture of a little girl teaching the dog to sit.  I asked her what she could write to tell about the picture and she said, "The dog is sitting."  In Calkin's program, you draw a line for each word to help reluctant or new writers understand where one word ends and the next begins, to teach how to sound words out phonetically, and to help them to see how much they have left to write. So, I drew four lines on her paper and said, "Okay, let's write it down."  She had no trouble whatsoever writing, "The dog is," she knows those words.  But I know she has been struggling with phonetically decoding words and spelling them the way she hears them so I wasn't sure what she would do with "sitting."  I said, "What do you hear first?"  She said "S," and wrote that down.  Before I could ask her what she heard next, she said, "it!" and wrote that down. It is super hard for kindergartners to grasp "ing" so I wasn't surprised that she didn't know that part.  She said she heard an "e" and that was fine with me! Phonetically, that's not too far off and it's pretty common for kids to put an "e" for "ing."  This is what she wrote:

This is progress, in my opinion.  I think she could potentially write several sentences if she was motivated to do so.  I know she isn't quite where we would have hoped she would be academically just yet but considering the obstacles she's overcoming, I am very happy with what she is able to do. Who knows, maybe she'll write my next blog post!