Day 131 (5/11/11) - Birthday Book

Given his late-summer birthday, Ryan was the last one in his preschool class to update the Birthday Book.  The Birthday Book is an album created by his teacher to document the interests and ambitions of her students as well as capture their handwriting and drawings from when they were preschoolers.  Each student is asked to complete 4 pages.  They were encouraged to decorate the pages any way they wanted - with stickers, photos, hand-drawn pictures, magazine clippings, etc.  On the day of their scheduled birthday celebration, each child was invited to share their Birthday Book pages with their classmates.  For the final page, which asks what they want to be when they grow up, the teacher has the other students try to guess the correct answer.  Apparently the kids love this part because Ryan would come home from school and inform me what each of his classmates wanted to be.  (It seems as though the girls want to be horse trainers or ballerinas while the boys want to be clone troopers or firemen.)

Ryan was very excited to finally have his chance to do his Birthday Book pages.  For three nights, we worked on it after Gavin had gone to bed.  He insisted on doing all the handwriting himself, which was pretty impressive and ambitious given the amount of writing required and the fact that many of his peers' parents had written or typed the answers for their child.  I would read him the question, he'd come up with his answer, then I'd spell it for him while he wrote it in the appropriate space.  Thankfully, I was able to persuade him to use a pencil instead of a marker because there was a lot of erasing and re-writing that took place as he learned about letter spacing and size.  After all of the writing was finished and the photos were glued, he decorated the pages with crayon drawings and stickers.  We were both pleased with the finished product.  He was proud of what he had created and I was amazed at how his fine motor skills have improved since the beginning of the school year as his handwriting and drawings have improved tremendously!