Handwriting is sort of the bane of school right now. Collin seriously is not a fan of phonics at all and handwriting is what he hates the most. Learning has always come fairly easily for him and he's a perfectionist. Well, he's also a Kindergartner learning to write and when his letters don't look EXACTLY like they do on the handwriting sticker strip he gets very angry at himself and declares he "can't do it!" Oh! I very much dislike that phrase. I had been researching ways to get children to want to write and one of them recommended using the child's imagination and interests to my advantage. So, I told Collin that he was an astronaut and he had to write the words I dictated to him to save the rest of the crew before their oxygen ran out.
It worked... at first. He was so eager to save his crew. Then he started stressing and hyperventilating. Paul came out to talk to him and calm him down but that didn't help. So, finally, I took him in my arms and held him for a minute. Then, between each gasp, he got out the phrase, "Will you... turn that.... off?" He was pointing to the timer that was telling us how much oxygen was left. I turned off the timer and in a few minutes he was breathing normally again. He said, "Let's not do that again."
So, moral of this story is... don't use this method on a child with a very vivid imagination. It just might backfire on you. haha! Poor kid!
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6 comments:
I know it's handwriting but you can try letting him write it in sand or on aluminum foil til he gets a grip.
We've done that.... rice, chalkboard, dry erase board... he just doesn't like them. He wants all his lines to be perfect. So frustrating. He just doesn't get that a few errors are OK.
HAHAH! Poor Collin! So was he pretending the whole time or was he thinking that his hyperventilating was caused by the lack of oxygen? That is SO funny either way!
oh man poor kid! And poor mom too!
haha! He was pretending the whole time. :)
Wowsa! What an amazingly creative child! At least your kid wants to get it right. I have embraced that my kids don't care enough to write neat and will rarely need to write in the technological age we are moving into! And when my oldest complains about answers marked wrong on tests, when the answer was actually right I just say "Hmmm.... that sucks! I wonder why they marked it wrong. What do you think you could do to keep that from happening?" He just glowers at me!
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