Learning to Write and Draw

I am really fascinated by how Ella learns new things, and one of the most interesting so far has been the process of her learning to write and draw.

Thank goodness for her preschool, because even though I've had 31 years to work on my writing and alphabet knowledge, I would not have the slightest idea of how to actually teach it to Ella myself. But I love following along with what they're teaching and seeing how and what helps her to learn.

When Ella first started to write, the first step seemed to be for her to realize that letters were individual characters and she'd practice by writing many characters all over her pages. This one is from April, it was one of the first times where I could really see her trying to write.



They were all basically different kinds of circles and squiggles. Then she was able to recognize and create the differences between several of them, and would work on them over and over. In these she wrote capital As, Ws, Hs, Is, Os and Ds.





This is one of the first times of writing her first name!


Learning to use proper caps for her first name






First and last - this is from about a month ago, I am amazed how far she has come with it!



She's now also working on writing other people's names and likes asking me how to spell words and she'll try to write them. The other day she was asking me what projects we had to do and she made her own 'list', it was pretty neat.

Along the same lines as her writing, I have enjoyed seeing her progression of drawings. Just in the last few months, her drawings have started to take on shapes other than scribbles and lines, and 'portraits' have become her new specialty!





This one she was really proud of because she used the legs to spell her name


I love this one, it's the 2 of us, you can read "mommy" if you look closely :)


And this is her first math worksheet, from just a few weeks ago, she had to count the number of animals in each picture and choose the correct number.


I am one proud Mommy!!