E is for Elena

Elena likes to 'pretend write.' Some of you may have recieved a letter of her intent scribblings. She will say things as she 'writes' like 'Dear Aunt Marfa, I miss you, please come visit now. Love Elena.' Or 'Dear Gram, I'm not full of baloney. Love Elena.' So a few weeks ago when she told me she was writing I was not surprised. She was writing on the floor, I was making breakfast. She said, 'momma, I'm writing E's for Elena.' 'Hummm, ok, that's nice.' 'See momma, E for Elena.' 'That's nice, do you want milk or juice with breakfast.' She shows me the paper, and I'll be darned if she isn't actually writing the letter E! I saved that little scrap of paper (somewhere....it's somewhere in the house....). But here is some of her most recent E's.



It turns out that she learned this in school (duh, because it wouldn't have occurred to me that she could do it, or to try and teach it to her...we are pretty low key about such things). They let the kids 'sign in' and taught her to look for her name with an E. Then she learned to write the E. At first we thought she was very advanced (what parent doesn't) then it turns out that Samuel can write his whole name, so we dropped it down a notch. We are proud of her, but we are maintaining our 'no forced learning' at a young age and recoil from any 'official alphabet studies' or 'must learn to read before kindergarden' bunko that is so prevalent now.



Elena has also started moved up a notch in drawing pictures that resemble what she is trying to draw. The first was a fish, in Utrecht. But here is a sample of her drawing of a 'her.' 'she has feet'