Before and after journal entries—chronology

Just a couple of weeks ago I sat down and spent some time talking with Calvin about interesting and varied sentence structure. That went over pretty well, so when this week he wrote an entry with a Proustian sense of chronology I decided it was time to tackle that "language arts" subject as well. It's actually not a new subject for us—when he was younger we out story cards in order after reading books, and his entries summarizing the Oz books has been good practice as well—so our chat was a brief one.

After he'd written his entry I asked him a few questions about it. "Were the raccoon prints and mole hole part of the game? If all those things happened at the end during the game, what did you do during the actual program? Of course, having been at the event I understood where the time warp had happened in the act of writing about it. (You might also notice some missing letters. Those had been erased for handwriting purposes, to make sure that they were readable, but they never got rewritten because he wrote a second entry instead).

The  journal "re-entry" gained not only a smoother time line, but also a little more sentence variety and clarity, and improved handwriting. Sometimes I think it's just a matter of concentration.