Writing

For quite some time Elisabeth's verbal abilities have far exceeded her fine motor skills. She has learned to sound out words, but when it comes to writing the letters, she is often intimidated to try. In fact, the letter S has kept her from writing her name. She can write all the letters, but finds the S difficult, and so when she gets to it wants to quit. Thus, her signature over the past several months has been Eli.

This week she made two major leaps forward in writing. The first is that she gained the ability to write an S. (In reality, she just developed the initiative to try it until she got it.) So now Eli is gone, and we have Elisabeth back again! The second is her willingness to take dictation. For some reason, until now she has been intimidated to write letters when asked to do so. But this week she wanted to write Joe and Emily on an envelope for our neighbors, and so she asked me how to spell their names, and wrote their names letter by letter as I dictated them.

We're on the road to writing!