Travis was writing a story the other day. I generally push him to just try to sound out the spelling of words, rather than telling him how to spell them. He's getting better, but oftentimes forgets the vowels.
In the midst of his story writing, he came up to me and said "Is this how you spell 'wasn't'?"
wasint
So, I praised him for his effort, and explained that he was very close. And then asked him if he'd learned about contractions in Kindergarten. He looked at me rather blankly, so I explained that a contraction was kind of like two words thrown together.
Ohhhh, yes, we learned about those. But at school we call those compound words.
Well, actually contractions are different from compound words. A compound word is -
One word that is made up of two other words! Like..... pancake!
Yes, yes that's right. In a compound word, two words come together to make a totally new word. But a contraction is when two words that you would normally say separately are kind of shoved together into one word to make it easier to say.
(That's right, I should totally be an early education teacher, I use such glamorous descriptions to explain things.)
At any rate, we talked about contractions, and I told him that when the two words are smashed together, one or two letters come flying out of the word, and you use the little apostrophe mark to show where those letters used to be.
We went through some examples. Travis took it to a whole new level and said,
We should write subtraction sentences out of these!
And then proceeded to take a piece of paper and write:
he had - ha = he'd
did not - o = didn't
Grammar lessons AND math combined?? Man, I love this kid.
After our impromptu English lesson, Travis went back to writing his story. As he showed it to me later, this is what I saw:
You can see the little hash marks flying out of the word wasn't. This didn't surprise me terribly, because these hash marks were the way I had illustrated to Travis how the letter (or letters) in a contraction disappeared.
I said, "I see you're showing here how the o disappears."
Oh no, mom, the o didn't disappear. It just flew off the page and onto the next page. See?
And there it is. You can follow those hash marks to the o in the word told.
I'm telling you. This kid is awesome.
Here's the unadulterated transcript. There's an area or two where I might need to translate, otherwise, this is it's original form:
"Travis and Noah, Science Detectives - The case of the flying bird
Once upon a time ther was two brothers named Travis and Noah and they liked to prtend to be science detectives. One day they saw a bird it wasn't a regular bird. It was a fast flying bird. Travis saw it. He told Noah. He said ok I'll find some hints. Ok Travis side (said). Rite away Travis saw a hint it was a blak hole! Later, Noah find a hint. What is it side (said) Travis. Ant's side (said) Noah. Then Travis saw a hint it was a bigger blak hole! Travis saw a pipe in both holes. One was samall. One was biger. Travis whnt to the swangsite (swingset) he saw a inviseble pipe it was waer (where) the big pipe led to. Travis saw a prat of a spnge (part of a sponge). Ants waer boncing (were bouncing) off of it. They all landit on the bird. How did they all do that Travis wishpered! Travis can wishpr sooo quiet nobody can hear him! Rane clouds came."
And that's that.
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