Rachel’s writing and drawing skills developing
It is amazing to see how fast our 5 year old is growing up. Last night before Rachel and I watched the movie “WALLE” together, she drew the following picture on our living room whiteboard. If you click on this image and view it on Flickr, you can read the annotation notes I added with Shelly’s help. These explain what the different parts of the drawing are, according to Rachel. She is showing a great deal of attention to detail here, and also starting to try drawing in three dimensions instead of just two.
Rachel REALLY enjoys using our family iTouch and my iPhone whenever she can, and this morning spent some time watching part of the first Harry Potter movie in the living room.
During the morning, Rachel (who is 5 but has not started kindergarten yet since her birthday is after September 1st) wrote the following note to her mother:
In case you can’t read all the words, here is the text:
Dear Mom:
Do not mess with my movie.
Love, Rachel
We can see Rachel is not yet getting the idea that text is written and read from left to right and top to bottom, but this is her best effort writing to date I’ve seen. This is great work developmentally for her age, I think.
Even more amazing than seeing her attention to detail in drawing and writing, however, is hearing her observations and questions. During WALLE, for instance, she asked me if our earth ever WAS really “like that.” (All full of trash.) We had a discussion about pollution and our responsibility to be good stewards of the earth, keeping things clean and working to pick up trash.
She had lots of other good questions during the movie which I don’t remember now. I love the movie WALLE. Like all other Pixar movies, it has important themes which are big but also simple, straightforward messages that are easy for anyone to understand. The love story here, and the journey WALLE and EVE take to eventually hold hands, is very touching. It was special to share this movie again with Rachel! How amazing we can watch a movie like this, which we own on DVD, anytime we want. That was not the case when I was growing up, before the advent of the VCR. My kids probably can’t relate to the idea that there was a time when we couldn’t listen to a song or see a movie with just a few clicks on a screen.
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walle, drawing, art, draw, write, writing, development
