Writing Assignment: the Friendly Letter

Sly's assignment was to write a friendly letter to a would-be pen pal in another country with a different culture, and to include telling them about a holiday or celebration we celebrate here. I suggested he write for real to his 'sponsor brother' in Sri Lanka.

May 7, 2009

Dear A.,

My name is Sly. I am eleven years old. I live in Alabama and I like to pretend that i'm a spy or secret agent.

Here in Amarica we have celabrations for diffrint things. The most recent one was Easter. When we celabrate Easter we also play a game called Easter Egg Hunt. The way you play is before the game some one hides a lot of plastic eggs with candy in them all over a field, then every one who's playing gos out in the fielb and tries to find the Easter Eggs.

If you didn't know we have a new baby boy. He can crawl quite fast now.

Your friend,

Sly

A couple of additional observations:
Sly did use proper friendly letter format, but blogger isn't letting me reproduce paragraph indentations.

His cursive handwriting was very nicely done. He still writes slowly, but very neatly. Amazingly enough, though, he can still reverse letters in cursive (as he did with 'field' and 'fielb' above).

His spelling is SOOO much better than it used to be. We used to use a spelling program, and he would learn the words and ace the tests, but still not be able to spell words he 'knows' when he was writing in real life. Finally, I just quit worrying about spelling, and over time it is simply correcting itself. Often he will know a word isn't spelled quite right, but he no longer lets that stop him from continuing to write. That alone is another big improvement, and the increased writing naturally leads to increased opportunities to work on spelling 'in the real world' where he needed the spelling work in the first place. Funny how sometimes 'relaxing' is the right answer to progressing. Anyway, he did correct all spelling errors before we mailed the real letter out, but this is how his letter was before any corrections.