Jon’s teacher called us this afternoon in a high state of excitement. A few weeks back she started doing creative writing exercises with Jon, meaning he looks at a picture and comes up with a few sentences about the picture. His first story, upon seeing a photo of a cow was:
This is a cow.
It is black and white.
It is saying moo.
Keep in mind that he dictates the sentences to the teacher, who writes them down. Later Jon types up the dictation.
On Monday Jon was so excited about Hallowe’en that his teacher decided to try something a lot more advanced, as an experiment only (she originally wasn’t going to try this until after Christmas). He was using Intellitalk, a software program that reads a word aloud after it’s been typed. This allowed Jon to type out his own words, see how close he came, and self-correct if necessary. This is what he typed out all by himself, punctuation and all:
Hi mom and dad ,
I liked haloween . Trick or treeting was fun. I went to lots of hoosis. Are sed the pirat. Then I went home .
Jon
(He meant “Arrrrrr said the pirate.” So how the heck are you supposed to spell “arrrrrr” anyway?)
He was only prompted “what would you like to say?” or “what happened next?” by the teacher; otherwise he maintained full sentences in his head as he typed them, spelling familiar words correctly and trying to phonetically spell out new words. He remembered to put spaces between words and only had to be reminded about putting capitals at the start of sentences. Wow – This certainly blew everyone away big time!
About three weeks ago, Jon announced he wanted to be a pirate for Hallowe’en. Bachan had brought him some pirate gear (hat, hook, eyepatch–standard pirate issue). 
