Spelling

July 12, 2012 in Homeschooling | 2 comments

I tried to make up my own spelling curriculum and I didn’t do a very good job of it.

I wanted to get a sense of where Sam is at with spelling, and how interested she is in it. It turns out that she is interested, but I almost killed her interest with my sloppiness in being aware of where she is at.

I decided to have her transcribe sentences that I made up on the spot, with very simple words. Then she would give me the paper and I’d circle the incorrect words and help her figure out how to spell them correctly and she’d re-write them. The first sentence was “The cat sat on the mat.” She spelled everything correctly and was thrilled. The next sentence was, “I can read and write.” Not only did she get “read” and “write” wrong (which I expected), but she spelled “can” with a “k.” I didn’t think this would be a big deal – I thought she would be thrilled to learn the proper spelling. But she was devastated to have done it wrong. Maybe one mistake would have been okay, but three was crushing to her. I also don’t think she minds if she spells something out loud incorrectly, but when she writes it down and it is wrong, it is very upsetting to her. (She does the same thing with her math work – she freaks out if she makes a mistake in writing, but is happy to correct herself orally.)

I’m not not happy with her attitude towards making mistakes – this is the same issue I’ve struggled with for years now. Sam is not good with “failure” and rarely wants to try something unless she can do it well. But what I’ve learned is that I can’t address this problem directly and I can’t talk her out of it. And instead of continuing with the spelling lessons this way, hoping that she will eventually come to see that the mistakes are opportunities for learning, which is what I would have done in the past, I am going to do the opposite: I’m going to go out of my way to keep these “failures” from happening, and I don’t have any bright ideas about how to introduce just the right level of difficulty or how to avoid the problem of writing things down incorrectly. It’s time to buy something.

I just purchased Spelling Workout from Amazon. When I get it, I’ll take a look and see if it might work for us. So, I suppose I didn’t do such a bad job designing my own spelling program – it revealed what level she is at, how interested she is, and how I might best capitalize on that interest. See, I’m okay with failure!

  1. Cornelia on August 18, 2012 at 12:26 am

    You might try having Sammy do spelling orally — like in spelling B’s — until her handwriting becomes fluent. The only problem with that is that, at her age, she should be focusing more on the sounds and less on the letter names. But perhaps you could try a hybrid, like: “How do you spell ‘read’?” — ” — R-E-A-D”.

    If the spelling workbook doesn’t catch on, you could use lists of ‘most commonly used’ words and then use a multi-sensory approach to spelling practice.

  2. Amy on August 24, 2012 at 2:24 pm

    Cornelia, I mentioned in a later post that the Spelling Workout book didn’t work because Sam got too caught up in her printing errors…sounds like you might have read that. However, Sam’s printing is improving so quickly that I’m just going to set spelling aside for a while. Her interest seems to have waned anyway. Before I try yet another thing, I’ll give the workbook a try again. Then, if she still gets upset about the writing, I’ll move on. She is less upset by written mistakes lately. I think she might be getting used to the idea that it is not the end of the world.