Letter from a Five-Year-Old

Olaf and I sat down this morning to work on writing. I thought we'd better ease into it. I wrote, "Hello, Olaf!" on his notebook, and he copied, "Hello Olaf" underneath. I wrote a sentence about Mac the Cat, a character whose story we know and love and read together when we feel like practicing that soft "a" sound, and he read it and then copied it underneath. Then he raised himself up a bit and whispered in my ear, "Chris is coming today."

Chris is Olaf's oldest brother, a few years out of college, married, and living outside Holden Village. But, as Olaf astutely pointed out, he's coming to visit today.

Shrewd Teaching Aide that I am, I looked down at Olaf and said, "Would you like to write a letter to Chris?"

So it began.

"Shall we start it, 'Dear Chris'?" I've gotten used to writing with Olaf; he's at a bit of a loss to tell a narrative himself, and often needs prompting to speak in full sentences.

"Yeah," he said.

"Dear Chris," I wrote, reading it aloud as I did.

"I wish I was out."

And I copied this down. He hadn't waited for me to prompt him; he hadn't waited for me to suggest what we might talk about first; he hadn't waited for anything, in fact, except for me to finish writing. And when I finished writing "out," reading aloud as I went along, Olaf said, "You've been out for a year."

So down this went as well. And I just want to point out, that according to this logic, if you're not at Holden, you're just on a really long "out".

"I'm in Kindergarten." He waited for me to catch up. "I'm almost in First Grade." I said it slowly and wrote it down. "You're coming back today." Then, "I forgot what I was doing." And, "I am writing." (No clue.) Long pause.

"Is that all you want to say?" I ventured.

"Yeah."

"How should we sign it? 'From Olaf'? 'Love, Olaf'?"

"Love, Olaf." I wrote it down.

We moved to a table and I got out the triple-lined paper (dotted line in the middle) for him to copy. We went one sentence at a time: I wrote, then he copied. Eventually he noticed that I persisted in ending my lines with a little dot, and he started copying these as well.

"Do you want to draw a picture?"

He did. He sketched in pencil an image of two people, one very much taller than the other: himself and Chris. It was raining in the picture. Chris was holding an umbrella over them.

"Do you want an envelope?"

He did. I showed him how to fold the pages so they would fit, and he asked me to seal it, and to address the front.

"What shall we put, 'To Chris, From Olaf'?" I was back to prompting.

"Yep. You write it."

I did. Until I got to Olaf. "Do you want to write your own name?"

He took the pencil, and I pushed the envelope over to him.

"How do you do 'Saint'?"

Olaf usually writes his name without the Saint, but a pack of J-termers from St. Olaf University had on sweat shirts that apparently taught him this was his full appellation.

"Um, it's an 'S' and then a 't'," I said, not knowing why I should discourage this.

We finished up and drew a stamp, and now we're just waiting for the bus. Olaf is smiling.