Letters

She does it on her own initiative which I think is simply perfect. I just want her to play and use her imagination and cast broad strokes of gloppy finger paint across the big paper on her easel from Santa, but if she wants to sit down and practice writing letters then I'm all for it. She has a natural interest in the shape of letters. She likes to look at the Waldorphy alphabet books I bought that present letters in works of art: using a painting of a mountain with two peaks to teach the letter M, a river with two forks and a connector stream to teach R, three witches on a broomstick to teach W. For a while she has been writing her name. The S is usually backwards and I used to not say anything about it because she received such joy from the accomplishment I didn't want to ruin the experience with a criticism. But now she has written the whole alphabet, several times, and even a three word sentence once, that I feel like I can be more honest. And so the other day when she told me that they all wrote their names at preschool the other day I asked, "Did you write the S backwards?"
"Yes, I wrote it backwards, wait..no, I wrote it the right way."
I remember writing my name for the first time. I remember sitting at our dining room table with the plastic gold tablecloth in our government house in the valley. I remember the way the letters looked on the sheet of white paper. Same size. Same boxy feel. Four letters. I remember what it felt like to put letters on paper.