Every day, I teach kids how to write better. I teach them how to organize their thoughts, how to plan their writing, how to improve their sentence variety, how to proofread effectively, and seemingly countless other things. As L has begun school, I’ve been thinking about what it will be like to teach L these things, at which age I might begin, how quickly we might progress. How fun it might be.

Last night, it began.

“I have a report to write for school. We had to choose an animal we don’t know anything about. I chose a sea turtle,” she said last night. And so we went off to the library to get some books on the subject. She devoured two of them during her evening reading ritual and was ready to go.

“Tomorrow,” I assured her.

Tonight, after dinner, we sat down at the computer and I began teaching the Girl how to make an outline. For practice, we worked on favorites: favorite animals, favorite foods, favorite books.

Then the first outline of the report itself. Some from her head; some from her books. It was slow going: we had to figure out how to spell words, how to type those words (“Where is ‘z’ daddy?”). And the end result?