The thing about Eddie.
Eddie is the teddy bear on the left of the picture on the right is Elliot's bear Jak. Eddie is Elliot's class bear, who is sent home each night with a student. I had heard about Eddie from Elliot earlier in the year and one day Elliot wrote a note to Eddie asking him to come to his place and play X-box and cricket with his dad and meet Jak, Elliot's bear.
As you can see Elliot had his turn, and this is probably the last time Elliot smiled before Eddie was returned to school that day. That morning I awoke to hear P exasperatingly implore Elliot to be more careful with Eddie's diary.
The thing about Eddie is that after spending an evening in your home, your child is to write a diary entry as if from Eddie about what he did and who he met. When I awoke, one page of Eddie's diary had already been removed by P due to Elliot's excessive untidiness. Much to P and my chagrin we have one of those boys. The written prose of one of those boys always seems to end up looking like that dirty kid from Charlie brown - the words appear on the page as if surrounded in a cloud of dirt. Elliot presses so hard that when corrections are made by erasure there always seems be a smudgy background left behind.
P and I usually have to tag team the homework duties, when one of us runs out of patience as Elliot turns into a teary mess, the other parent has to take over as the voice of reason, this time it was my turn. To complete that diary entry took a gargantuan effort from P and me that morning. P had tried to get Elliot to practice the entry on a separate page, that didn't work. I wrote the passage out on the separate page and asked Elliot to copy it word for word that didn't work.
Finally I spent 10 minutes dictating letter by letter including capitalisation and spaces and he got it completed. We can do without starting our day with such drama.Writing neatly is just not Elliot's strong point and as we bade farewell to Eddie that day I asked P and Elliot to tell Elliot's teacher we never want Eddie to darken our doorsteps EVER again.
posted by Amanda @ 2/20/2005 10:29:00 am
4 comments
4 Comments:
Oh, poor little Elliot :( He's sooo cute!
Hiya Lushlife, its a great idea though eh -the take-home teddy bear.(btw,thanks for b'day wishes).
I thought it was a good idea too, till it happened;)
I do this thing with my young students that gets them to enjoy writing. I give them a pack of stickers and they have to write a story and can use the stickers to help tell the story. There was a *mouse sticker* who liked to eat *ice cream* etc. I can't tell you why but it makes it much less tedious and painful for them. I use stamps too, but that would just be more to smudge. Don't let your little Elliot off the hook on writing. Messy shouldn't matter at that age. I was and still am a hard presser. Try a mechanical pencil. He'll eventuall learn not to press so hard because he'll break the point.
There's some teacher tested info.
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