Our emergent writer

Maia's gone through a little explosion of growth in the reading, writing and drawing departments over the last couple of weeks. As a part of her imaginary play, she'll write notes to other characters in the story that she's crafting; usually, she's Mary Poppins, and those of us around her are playing other roles in that film/book/drama combo. Eli is usually Michael Banks, and I'm often Jane. Daddy gets to play the role of Bert.

This morning, just after our Sunday AM pancake breakfast, Maia was switching roles back-and-forth between herself and Mary Poppins, sending notes through the mail (which involves putting them in Mona's crate, for some reason) and reading them out loud. I've attached a photo of a couple of the notes and a drawing.

From Maia's writing

Back when I was an elementary classroom teacher, my favorite subject to teach was writing (it was the area in which I had some specialized training), and so I get a particularly gratifying thrill from watching Maia go through the process of becoming an emergent writer here in my own house. She's pretty adept at writing most of the upper-case letters of the alphabet without reminders, and of course she's been writing her name for many, many months now. She knows the sound-letter correspondences, too, and when she's writing a word, she'll do that emergent-writer thing of writing down the first and last consonant sounds in a word and nothing else. So, for example, she'll write the name "Mary" as "MR" (or, occasionally, "MRE" if she's paying attention to vowel sounds). That's enough to represent the word for her. She tracks left to right across a page, and top to bottom, and she'll often add her own lines to the page first before she writes down the words.

I love watching this unfold before my eyes and to have it be so self-directed on her part. She's enthusiastic about writing ... there's no "Hey Maia, why don't you write Mary a letter?" from us. So cool. :)