School is for Girls

Homeschooling is interesting for many reasons.  When it isn't making me crazy, one thing I find most interesting is how differently my kids learn.  Specifically how C & A learn because Natalie is not really "in school" - although I did have to start making a loose plan for her because she likes having a couple of worksheets to do while she sits with the big kids.  Actually, it's more that she feels very left out if she does not have school work to do too.

Spelling is a subject that I have not really made up my mind about.  I tried making a list for Caleb to study each week and it was just comical.  Mostly what I do with him is study phonetic rules and talk about words he spells wrong in his writing.  If he has a word that he uses frequently and spells it wrong, I will have him copy that word, but we don't have a list or a weekly test.  In the book Ramona's World by Beverly Cleary, Ramona's teacher notes that "Ramona's spelling will improve when she wants it to improve." and ultimately I feel this way about Caleb.  Sometimes this is an exasperating thing and I feel personally responsible; sometimes I am very at peace about it.

Annalise is very different.  She doesn't seem to need a weekly drill because she usually remembers how to spell a word after she has been corrected a time or two.  She sees patterns in the ways vowels and syllables are used.

Today - just for fun - Annalise was writing words in a notebook - she wrote them all 5-6 times (enough to finish the line, so some fit more) and she spelled them all right.  I told her that was what kids in school often do - copy spelling words.  She said, "That sounds like fun!" and Caleb just groaned!  I often think - school is for girls!

About spelling - or really about the English language - I once heard someone comparing English and Chinese and saying that you can't teach English like Chinese because English is phonetic and Chinese uses pictures, which as far as I know you have to memorize.  But English is not as phonetic as, say, Spanish.  I think the kids are perfectly justified in thinking "bacon" is spelled "bakin" because that is how we say it.  So clearly, you have to memorize the 9,999 exceptions to the rule and the funny thing is that we do it - at least for most words.  I like studying phonics with the kids because there are phonetic consistencies in English, but there are consistently exceptions too and they have to learn them.  Still - their motivations for learning are not the same, so the speed at which they'll learn them will not be the same either.

For spelling lessons we use a combination of the Abeka Handbook for Reading and the Explode the Code workbook series.  Abeka has an exhaustive list of "special sounds" that can be used to classify all but a few "sight words" - Abeka has significantly fewer sight words than most curricula. Abeka's method does not completely match up with Explode the Code, but there are a lot of ways they compliment each other.  Explode the Code is cheaper and very funny.  Each lesson will have sections of pictures and sentences that may or may not be nonsense and the student must read them carefully because the nonsense answer might be the right one!  There are 8 books and an optional half book between each one for review.  Caleb did book 3 and 3 1/2 and improved those skills a lot by completing the half book.  I don't think he will need to do book 4 1/2.