Teaching our children to spell takes time, effort, and patience. As a busy working full-time mom, my time is limited. Therefore, I make sure to be very intentional with how I use my time, especially the time I have set aside to homeschool my kids.
So, you might wonder, why do I waste time on teaching my kids to spell when auto-correct fixes it for them? Disclosure: I may receive commissions for purchases made through links in this post.
Have you ever been at work and witnessed something that caused you to rush home to make sure YOUR kids knew better? I was teaching her how to use the cash register, not a very difficult job.
However, I must admit that learning how to accept the different payment types can be tricky the first few times through. The store I was working for accepted all payments, and cash is a favorite way to pay for many customers. At the end of her shift, we headed in to count the till. I sat down to pull out the paperwork to be completed, and she started to count the coins. To my complete shock , she had no idea how to count change.
I am not talking about how to add them up because this could be fixed with a calculator. Needless to say, that night, I came home, dumped a big container of change in front of my kids, and informed them today we learn to count change! Many life skills are no longer required or taught in public school, as I learned that day talking with her.
Some of these are also not required in homeschool. Because I work with the public and spend time communicating through written work, I understand the importance of having good spelling skills. The beauty of homeschooling is you get to decide what is included in your homeschool. Spelling is considered one aspect of literacy reading, writing and spelling. While s pelling is not my strong point, I feel that it is very important. Here are 3 reasons I decided to teach spelling skills:. Does your child plan to be a writer, work in a profession where reports are due, or even need to take notes?
Do you have a child that struggles to write? This may be because they lack spelling skills. Children who struggle to spell often use the same words repeatedly in their writing, making their writing boring and repetitive. If your child is struggling to read, learning basic spelling skills may help them overcome this challenge.
Learning to read is learning to recognize words quickly. Once your child learns how words are put together through meaningful spelling instruction, they will see and understand patterns and apply them to new words.
When hunting for the perfect curriculum for my children I knew what I wanted in a spelling program. I wanted not only a list of words but I wanted more than just a memorization list. Spelling workout is my favorite program and we have been using it for a few years. As a working mom, I love that they can do this workbook on their own.
I check to make sure it is correct in the end and give a spelling test each week. At the end of the day, I check it and leave a fun sticker to encourage them. This story is engaging and usually teaches them something brand new that the children are eager to share.
This story is often historical or science-based! My son is using Workbook G , and this workbook is the first we have used without this story at the beginning of each lesson. He was very disappointed. Next, you get a list of 20 words written in cursive.
I like this as I feel children should be able to read cursive. We have family members that write notes, letters, lists and more in cursive so I want my children to know how to read it. Plus I was in a restaurant and the menu was in cursive.
Yay for being able to order. There is a grammar tip at the top of the page along with examples to explain what they are talking about. Then you get 5 boxes. Each box is a practice in which using the spelling list words they complete an activity in grammar and logic. One box is a puzzle of sorts, be it crossword-style, unscramble, or some other type. Another is proofreading, where they not only learn to proofread but also learn the proper proofreading marks.
The last is a writing practice. I give them a spelling test at the end of each lesson. Meanwhile, engineer and applied linguist Dmitry Orlov has come up with another solution: Eliminate the need to learn English spelling, temporarily if not permanently.
The human brain is primed to memorize groups of speech sounds, not sequences of letters, he says. With this in mind, he developed his own writing system, Unspell , which is more or less a phonetic rendition of spoken English. Unspell is available in two versions to account for additional differences between North American and British English; the white paper goes into detail about how other complexities such as homonyms and homographs are handled. Orlov also took care to design the symbols in a way he hopes will minimize difficulties for people with dyslexia and certain other visual or motor impairments—there are no loops or symbols that are flipped versions of other symbols, for instance.
A beginning reader should be able to learn to read sentences in Unspell in just a few months, Orlov says. He eventually plans to publish Unspelled versions of all the titles in Project Gutenberg. Orlov has informally tested it with a handful of people and plans to pilot it among other students in the near future. In the meantime, he adds, the primer has sold hundreds of copies since he made it available in late ; as far as he can tell, most of the buyers have been parents whose children are struggling with reading.
Rather, he views it as an accessible literacy training ground for children, before they learn to read and write conventional English. This is akin to the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, he says, which also require a lot of memorization and are initially taught using simplified scripts. Just as importantly, at that stage, they would approach the task from the vantage point of literate, empowered persons who are "already fluent in English.
Orlov also expects Unspell to help foreign-born adults who are learning English pronunciation, as well as adult native speakers who struggle with reading or writing. He plans to introduce an app that will allow people to snap a picture of English text with a smartphone and have it "unspelled" on the fly another app will translate in the other direction , and a browser plug-in that can Unspell anything on the Internet. To help with writing, people will be able to type words the way they sound, and the software will show the word or words that correspond to that sound, with cues regarding meanings if there are any ambiguities.
In an ideal world, Orlov also envisions Unspell appearing on important signs, alongside Braille, as an accessibility requirement. But he says technologists should always be prepared for their inventions to be taken in unexpected directions. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. Experts point out that teaching spelling systematically dispels the myth that spelling is unpredictable and confusing. That English is too chaotic to make sense is a myth.
Sure, spelling is not simple, but when people understand its structure, it can be decoded. Communication : good spelling facilitates communication. By following the same rules for spelling words, we can all understand the text we read. Comprehension : good spelling avoids confusion.
In a way spelling is a bit like sports.
0コメント