A (pac) man of letters

I’ve made little secret of the fact that I’ve pretty much bred a duplicate of myself. Little E loves daddy’s video game collection. He’s inherited my GBA and many of its cartridges. But sometimes this isn’t such a great thing: what do I do when he’s not interested in his homeschool lessons because he’s got Super Mario on the brain?

I’ve been printing out my own writing work pages for him so he can practice his letters, something he’s in danger of falling behind on. There are days when he treats these exercises as pure torture (and passes those savings on to me). We take breaks, we do fun stuff, I don’t expect him to write out the entire alphabet in one sitting (yet), and yet this is an Achilles’ heel of his homeschooling. He. does. not. like. doing it.

Now, of course, some of you reading this probably fall into the school of thought that says “He needs to unplug from the damn video games. He talks about Mario too much.” (This has actually been said to me.) However, if you have even a passing familiarity with martial arts, there’s another school of thought: if someone throws their entire weight at you, step out of the way and let their momentum work against them. The enemy here is Little E’s attention span and his single-track-mind. His thoughts are seldom far from the mushroom kingdom. But how can I twist that into helping him learn?

I was messing with something else in Paint Shop Pro and realized that I have dingbat fonts for both Mario and Donkey Kong. So the crazy idea occurred: why not associate each letter with something that interests him from that “universe”? Write out a line of each letter, and then color the little picture that goes with that letter. Build a fun “bonus” into each line of letters so it doesn’t seem like so much of a chore.

Now, in some cases, this was easier said than done. I eventually had to rope in some other dingbat fonts sitting on my hard drive to fill in some gaps, as well as grabbing some images that I had long ago collected for the web site and turning them into something coloring-ready. But it’s amazing how much mileage I did get out of the Nintendo-related graphics.

Here, then, is Little E’s writing workbook in PDF form for your downloading pleasure (611kb). I know that he can’t be the only Mario-obsessed preschooler who needs some writing practice, so hopefully this will be of help to other parents out there. I may see about coming up with other “themes”, such as Star Wars, superheroes, and maybe a second round of video game-related characters, because there were numerous points where I had more than one idea for each letter.

If he can get reading and writing down, we can advance to world 1-2.

All characters are, of course, copyrighted by Nintendo and their respective rights holders. This is provided for personal use only.