{"id":592,"date":"2009-09-13T15:58:06","date_gmt":"2009-09-13T23:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/?p=592"},"modified":"2010-02-22T12:09:31","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T20:09:31","slug":"feeling-brilliant-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/?p=592","title":{"rendered":"Feeling brilliant today&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My 4 yr old has wayyyyy more interest in &#8216;school-y&#8217; stuff than his older siblings did.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure its because he see&#8217;s them reading and writing and he wants in on the &#8216;fun&#8217;.\u00a0 I fully support lots of books but regarding &#8216;school-y&#8217; stuff typically I&#8217;d prefer he developed more important 4 yr old skills like playing pretend, retelling\/narration or digging in dirt but he admittedly does a good bit of that as well so I won&#8217;t keep him from doing &#8216;school-y&#8217; stuff.\u00a0 He&#8217;s pretty fascinated at present with the letters in his name and gets them all recognizably on the paper except the letter S; that usually is all kinds of backwards, occassionally more Z like and sometimes has more twists and turns in it than a directionally impaired pirate map.\u00a0 Today I came up with a fun idea to teach him the more specific and defined shape of the letter S and he loves it so much that it left me feeling brilliant and like I couldn&#8217;t &#8216;not&#8217; share it with my friends.<\/p>\n<p>All I did was type a really huge letter S in\u00a0 a word document setting the property of the font to &#8216;outline&#8217;.\u00a0 Then I found some clip art via google images to add to my little letter &#8216;map&#8217; that would fit Bayus&#8217; interests and have a defined start and finish.\u00a0 For the first one (which I show pictured below) I put a house at the start of the S, a tree to go around, some ducks to avoid hitting and a play ground as the final destination (he loved that).\u00a0 The next one I made (which isn&#8217;t pictured) has a rocket ship to start, some clouds and birds to pass, some shooting stars to avoid and the planet saturn to finish at.\u00a0 Basically I placed the paper in front of him, handed him the first colored pencil in his pouch (the green one) and said &#8216;Hey Bayus, the boy with the green shirt wants to go to the park.\u00a0 Let&#8217;s start at his house, go around the tree, pass by the ducks and then he can play.&#8217;\u00a0 After Bayus followed along while drawing\u00a0 a line, I grabbed another pencil and said &#8216;lets have his blue friend go play to, start at the house&#8217;.\u00a0 We went through all his pencils and markers eventually saying there was a party at the park and finally the brown and yellow markers made their way as well (the cat and dog that didn&#8217;t want to be left at home).\u00a0 Later I made the space themed one and he enjoyed having each of his &#8216;characters&#8217; climb in the space ship and make it to Saturn.\u00a0 He&#8217;s requesting more adventure papers with themes of the zoo, the jungle and such other things.\u00a0 I&#8217;m not sure how many I make but I know I&#8217;ll definitely revisit this idea whenever we have a need for more detailed attention to another letter of the alphabet.\u00a0 Hope this idea helps someone else make handwriting FUN!<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-594\" title=\"IMG_4047\" src=\"http:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/IMG_4047.JPG\" alt=\"IMG_4047\" width=\"485\" height=\"560\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-595\" title=\"IMG_4048\" src=\"http:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/09\/IMG_4048.JPG\" alt=\"IMG_4048\" width=\"525\" height=\"700\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My 4 yr old has wayyyyy more interest in &#8216;school-y&#8217; stuff than his older siblings did.\u00a0 I&#8217;m sure its because he see&#8217;s them reading and writing and he wants in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-japan","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=592"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":625,"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592\/revisions\/625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teamhadjes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}