Practicing and Building Confidence

My son is a gifted kid, he's smart as a tack and I don't think that's just me being a parent thinking their child is the best. He has his challenges that's for sure and writing is one of them, and reading even more so.

One of the biggest improvements we've seen though is we signed him up for the right tutor program, not the wrong one. This has paid off in leaps and bounds when it comes to the kids confidence in his abilities and enjoyment of writing and copying things! This has been the most noticeable short-term improvement, he actually wants to write and will sit down and copy things quite often throughout the day!

There are these new cool things, they are multicolored impression note-pads or something, where it comes as a black sheet and you scrape off the black and it reveals these cool ass ty-dye colors underneath and you can write or draw pictures. It's really neat!

All of the things here were written or drawn by the little man himself! He has really made some great improvements in his writing skills. He takes all kinds of random things and just writes it down, transcribing and practicing his writing. I think that's a good step in the right direction for when he eventually gets better at reading again but this has been a really good change over the last 2 months I would say, compared to the previous 2 years we were paying for him to get tutoring at a different place that wasn't helping him as much as it was hurting him a bit.

There are still some things he gets mixed up, like you can see he reverses his letter N's and puts it backwards instead of the normal way but we don't say much about that, only to encourage him to keep on going and keep on practicing.

For kids that struggle to read and write, but can recite the last 20 animals they saw, the different cars or trucks and heavy equipment that are out on the road and how to change the brakes on a car, we just have to do what we can to help them practice and gain skills and confidence in their abilities!

With the one above and this one here, the little man was inspired by the letters and writing on a dollar bill. He wanted to write all of the words on it that he could find and he did a great job overall! The letters get pretty small on a dollar, particularly when it's something like the words Washington DC, the font is tiny! He was able to focus on each individual letter and didn't need my help in determining which is the next letter in the word. That was a great thing to see, as before he was blurring things and mixing them together by mistake.

He's also got quite the creative side to him! He drew this all by himself, and I'm not really even sure where he got the inspiration for the house, trees and yard. We don't live in a house like that lol so it was really cool to see what his little brain came up with. I think the black things are ducks or something in a pond, maybe fish, but he's been in quite the creative mood lately and it's really fun to see.

For a bit, which I know is normal, he wasn't really having much of an interest in doing the school related activities, he was far more focused on building Lego and doing other play activities around the house. In the past 3 weeks or so, he's been constantly writing and drawing, which has been a lot of fun to watch him go and see what he comes up with. I know that kids go through cognitive leaps and changes in their little brains quite a bit, so this is likely related to one of those phases of change in his ever-changing little body.

He's been pretty good at taking a book that we use for reading such as the level 1 books and looking at each page and copying down all of the letters and words! His penmanship is improving for sure, as most kids start out their writing is a little challenging. He actually almost writes better than I do now hahaha which is good! I think he tries to purposely write and focus so that he can read what is on the page. Poor penmanship leads to confusion about the letters and he has definitely called me and my wife out on that! We try to write things down for him and we do it in an informal way, such as a poorly written a or u and he calls us to task on it.

The other funny thing he does is take random things from around the house and write the words from it hahaha. I got a new pair of pants a few weeks ago and he took the card that it came with and decided to write what was on it down to do some practice.

He certainly comes up with some interesting drawings and situations! I think this one is another house, perhaps one that we drive by in our neighborhood or something but it's something that has meaning to him, so he committed it to paper!

The fun thing about this whole thing is that he created his own little book. He took all of these papers and taped them together and adds new pages to it every so often when he does something. I am absolutely going to keep this as a parental memento and give it back to him in 10 or 15 years when he's a lot older so that we have it as a fond memory to look back on!

Really proud of the little man, he's grown so much over the past year in so many ways, but one of the ways that gives us a lot of joy is that he has finally taken to writing and doing more educational things. We were struggling with that for a while, but as I mentioned earlier, once we got him the right tutor, it made a world of a difference! He has really blossomed into loving to do these things and we are trying our best to foster it as much as we can. We don't force him to do the writing right now, because we want him to look to doing it with joy instead of angst so we will make situations where we ask him to write the words down in this interesting book or card or something and he goes to town, and then spawns all kinds of writing and drawing the rest of the day!

Here's to helping the kids grow and develop, as parents should always be doing!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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