Penmanship practice

Sofia dressed herself today. She kept me company in the basement craft room (when I'm feeling artsie I call it the craft "studio") where she has her Ikea art easel. This easel usually only gets about 5 minutes of use at a time. I guess that's what you get for getting your kids things that you would have absolutely loved to have as a child. But Sofia couldn't be less like me as a kid. So, I try to remember that sometimes, thus the camouflage rain boots which she picked out to wear with her tan trousers and coordinating monkey-on-your-back. Who can go anywhere without one of these? Especially for penmanship practice.

Sofia has been learning her letters at school and she has been starting to recognize many of them in signs and anything with writing on it. She started by yelling out, "look there's Sofia" whenever she sees an 'S'. Now she recognized letters that correspond the names of the kids in her class or mami, daddy, and Marcelo's names. She can associate some letters with several words that begin with that name such as "E for elephant" and so on. It's very exciting to see her learning and to see the little wheels in motion that make everything click and make sense from one day to the next.

She doesn't yet have a lot of confidence writing, but on this day I was busily trying to get something done in my craft room and wanted to give her something worthwhile to do at the same time. So I asked her if she wanted to practice writing some letters. She requested the letter 'S' and the letter 'R' for daddy's name. I made a sample of each and then made dotted lines for her to trace over. I turned away to finish what I was doing and didn't even notice when she had done it all. We must appreciate that Sofia is not much of a rule-follower. You give her some structured lines and something to trace, she's much more inclined to throw a paint bucket at it then mindfully complete the task you intended. So you can see that I was very surprised when she called me over to look at what she had done. I was so pleased. And to see her doing it in her camouflage boots with the monkey on her back was the icing on the cake.