Queuereus – Journaling our learning

The Task: Look at this picture and tell me what you see.

The objective of this exercise was to get Michael familiar with putting thoughts into words on paper. Along the way, he practiced sentence discipline—getting the punctuation right and ensuring proper sentence casing.

The unfortunate thing about this book was that it was too familiar to him. He had read it and knew the characters. So, I asked him to describe it as he saw it first.

“There is a girl and a lion,” he began. I kept asking what else he saw. It was funny how his mind glossed over the Scarecrow.

It took a bit of time to get him to phrase the sentence as an expression. We communicated verbally first, without any writing. Only after he gave me a satisfactory sentence verbally did I allow him to write it down.

Along the way, he asked really good questions: When do we know to use a period? When should we use a comma? What about exclamation marks and question marks?

So, just for fun, I showed him how to include sentences with exclamation marks and question marks easily. He was very amused by it.

There was a lot of hand-holding in this exercise, but it is truly the very first step of many he will take.

God willing, he will take the A-Level General Paper in about a decade. When he does, he is likely to be reading this blog. What will you write, dear boy? How will you compose your thoughts? How will you be persuasive in your writings?

Dear Michael, this is where it all started: 50 words in pencil on a Saturday afternoon.