Weekend Focus -- Spelling

This weekend, I am focusing on the Spell to Write and Read program. It takes some looking at in order to get it in one's head enough to actually use it. On the other hand, I like the approach. It totally makes sense to me. Not so much the details of how to do it as simply the approach.

Most teachers a century or so ago recommended SHORT phonics drills once or more a day and this is the approach I tend to take -- "stealth drills".

The other thing many teachers recommended in the past was using letter and word blocks or cards rather than waiting till the child is able to write well in order to teach reading. Most of my children were ready to read far before they could control a pencil well so it makes sense to me.

I think I'm going to start working slowly through the book with Paddy and Aidan (separately, I think) about twice a week. The rest of the time I will continue to have Aidan compose and reread journals, but I may try to incorporate some of the words he is learning from SWR into what I write for him to read.

Paddy -- hmm, he is reading quite a bit though silently. I think he really only needs the occasional spelling/phonics reinforcement in order to have more diversity in his word attack skills.

I usually have Aidan write several times a week (he actually ASKS to do that, so it's more of a matter of me being open to letting him write in my notebook). Paddy doesn't do much writing. Well, actually, he does write. He types. Hmm, have to think about whether drawing would serve the purpose better than handwriting right now.

Charlotte Mason talks about spelling in the context of learning to read for younger children.
For older children (who can already read) she thinks that dictation should largely take the place of formal spelling lessons.

Aidan's Journalling 2

Embarrassing to show my messy printing, but I wanted to put up the kind of thing I try to do regularly with Aidan (he asks for this activity -- "Can we do a reading lesson?"so that helps me remember.)

He journals verbally in this way and I write it down (sometimes if he seems stuck I finish a sentence for him).

Then we read it back together. He reads the words he knows and I fill in the other ones, dragging it out phonetically so that he sees the phonetic connection since he already knows the sounds the letters make.

Then sometimes he wants me to draw a picture, or we write a couple of words together -- I guide his hand a bit because of his motor problems.

This time I was experimenting with putting some phonetic words on top to practice. Funny, I taught him those five words last year but he has forgotten them. This is a Throwing Marshmallows type of thing. The kid has to want to catch the marshmallow and be able to catch it, otherwise it just bounces off again. Since he usually has fun doing these things, it's probably not so much of a problem if they don't all stick. I think Charlotte Mason said that kids probably only permanently acquire about 10 percent of things they are given the opportunity to learn. This is why the learning itself has to be wholesome, not dried out and overprocessed, so they can take what they are ready for and are not harmed by the part they are not ready for.

My new thought is to save the sheets of paper and have him reread them. Right now they are scattered all over the house and in my various notebooks. If I saved them they would be a journal of his speech and his thought processes, plus he could read them over as he gets better at reading.

I really am working on that printing. You can see why all my kids have trouble with their handwriting. My husband is even worse than I am! Oh well... at least it's readable.

Weekend Learning -- A Few Little Things

Kieron tells me he read Outlaws of Ravenhurst. We had lost it for a long time, and I suddenly saw it when I was playing music with Clare. He went off to his room with it and apparently read it through so quickly I never saw him. Also, I forgot to mention earlier that his grandma bought him a book of Brain Games and he has been doing them (and noticed and showed me fatal glitches in a couple of the puzzles btw). I need to find him some more books to read beyond rereads of Redwall and Hardy Boys.

Clare and I discussed the lifting of the SSPX excommunications for some time.

Kevin and the older kids watched The Blob. It was the first movie that Steve McQueen acted in.

I read MSB inside a Bee Hive to Paddy. He looked at the back cover where the other books in the series were listed and said "Here's one we don't have.... Magic School Bus inside the Human Body." I don't know where he learned "Human" and "Body". He is sounding out slightly more accurately than he used to, but mostly he is still relying on memorization.

Aidan read "fox" and "play".... two words I didn't realize he knew. He read FOX over here, at Outer Edge of Normal. Looking at Miranda's kindergarten activities for her young daughter, he got so thrilled that I think next week I am going to have to reproduce my own version. His favorite was the muffin pans with the alphabet, because that combines two of his favorite things. He read PLAY, um, at the opening screen of our VCR as it loaded in a Pokemon video.

Over on the left is a list of all the words I know that Aidan can read. Yes, in alphabetical order. I am THAT much of a dork : D. Most of them he can spell, too. Many of them are from his V-Tech phonics board, which I have mentioned before. I am not a big fan of electronic toys; I only started buying them because Aidan was SO weak for so long and for so long while he was in medical care, his inner emotional needs were on a complete different track from his input (which was based on his clinical needs, not his personal or developmental needs).... so he didn't have the slightest idea how to do something to get a response. He needed toys that would give him a big output for a tiny bit of input. Most kids get tired of electronic learning devices in very short order, but Aidan does not and has actually learned quite a bit from them. ... .they are self-correcting and endlessly patient and cheerful.

I remember making a list like this of all Aidan's spoken words -- he was just short of three and had about 20 words total. It impressed the people at his transition IEP from Early Intervention to school services, that I had written it all out.. I guess they like dorky moms.

Soon after that his vocabulary exploded so quickly that there was no need to keep track.

Interesting how there's two times I feel a need to keep track. When not much seems to be happening and I want to reassure myself that something is happening. And when there is SO MUCH happening that I know I will totally lose sight of it all if I don't try to keep some kind of record. Just a random thought....

Starting Up Again

I think I probably will start blogging daily learning logs again, even though they will be unschooly during this more relaxed time of year. I think I'll use Leonie's unschooly logs at St Anthony Academy's as a model. ... unless I decide to go with a narrative, which sometimes works better when we aren't doing many formal things.

To start off with where we seem to be right now. First, Aidan and reading.

Aidan seems to be at a "sensitive period" for words. Every day he asks me to write down all the words he knows -- he lists them for me: zipper, zebra, quiet, queen, dog, hippo, giant, sun, bus, top, tent, etc. Then he reads them to himself. Then he says, "Can I take them to bed with me?"

He spells every word he sees in his environment. Recently he has gotten interested in 100 Easy Lessons and will spell out words "MAD" and ask me what they mean. This reminds me of what I read in The Montessori Method not too long ago:

One of our most interesting discoveries was made in the effort to devise a game through which the children might, without effort, learn to read words. We spread out upon one of the large tables a great variety of toys. Each one of them had a corresponding card upon which the name of the toy was written. We folded these little cards and mixed them up in a basket, and the children who knew how to read were allowed to take turns in drawing these cards from the basket. Each child had to carry his card back to his desk, unfold it quietly, and read it mentally, not showing it to those about him. He then had to fold it up again, so that the secret which it contained should remain unknown. Taking the folded card in his hand, he went to the table. He had then to pronounce clearly the name of a toy and present the card to the directress in order that she might verify the word he had spoken. The little card thus became current coin with which he might acquire the toy he had named. For, if he pronounced the word clearly and indicated the correct object, the directress allowed him to take the toy, and to play with it as long as he wished.

When each child had had a turn, the directress called the first child and let him draw a card from another basket. This card he read as soon as he had drawn it. It contained the name of one of his companions who did not yet know how to read, and for that reason could not have a toy. The child who had read the name then offered to his little friend the toy with which he had been playing. We taught the children to present these toys in a gracious and polite way, accompanying the act with a bow. In this way we did away with every idea of class distinction, and inspired the sentiment of kindness toward those who did not possess the same blessings as ourselves. [Page 300] This reading game proceeded in a marvellous way. The contentment of these poor children in possessing even for a little while such beautiful toys can be easily imagined.

But what was my amazement, when the children, having learned to understand the written cards, refused to take the toys! They explained that they did not wish to waste time in playing, and, with a species of insatiable desire, preferred to draw out and read the cards one after another!

I watched them, seeking to understand the secret of these souls, of whose greatness I had been so ignorant! As I stood in meditation among the eager children, the discovery that it was knowledge they loved, and not the silly game, filled me with wonder and made me think of the greatness of the human soul!

Now, where I need to catch up in my understanding of the Montessori method is in the idea that writing ought to come before reading. Certainly Aidan is "writing" in the sense that he will take his wooden or magnetic letters and form words he has memorized. Perhaps this is enough to expect of a child with motor difficulties. However, I would like to see both him and Paddy writing, and delighting in writing.

Week 15 -- the Little Ones

I've lost track of the day we're on since I stopped keeping daily logs.

This is how I worked on Paddy's schooling today... OK, not very colorful, but as a change it worked OK.

First I wrote down a little story he was telling -- that's over on the top right. I used to write out stories the older kids told when they were quite little, and then had them read them back for reading practice. They enjoyed this, and it's working quite well for Paddy and Aidan. Paddy was intrigued and read it out for himself. The last word is the only one he had trouble with and so I guided him to sounding it out.

Then I wrote out a few addition problems for him, underneath -- as you can see, just adding 2, which is review for him. He started to predict the answers --"the next one's going to be ten!!" and then I asked him to complete the question. Two plus What equals ten then? That was a little harder but he sort of got it by looking at the preceding ones.

Then I made the sheet of rimes for "at" and "it" that you can see over there on the top left. His phonics knowledge is rudimentary -- all his reading ability is sheer memorization of familiar words. He had a bit of trouble but sort of got it.

Then the middle sheet in the back -- I thought I would try some multiplication problems -- sets of two. He liked those and figured them out quickly.

Then I asked him to write a big C, which is something he did once last week. This was the only task that made him groan, but he did it. Then he asked to write an S, then he wrote another C, then he asked to try to write small letters. This is because of the OT's suggestion that big repeated motor movements are better to start with before trying to write normal size. I didn't know about this kind of thing when my older ones were little.


As for Aidan, he has been very involved with this (left).... calendar felts for the flannelboard. It looks chaotic but the last few lines actually wrap around like a snake. He still hasn't mastered number order past twenty, but that's obviously the skill that he is trying to master right now, so it was serendipitous that I was digging through supplies and found the calendar felts -- they were too advanced for him a year ago.






The OT was here today and she did:

• Wilbarger brushing and lotion massage, from center to extremities.
• Marching on mini-trampoline, then running in place, then squatting.
• Brain Gym (OT drawing X's and infinity symbols or horizontal 8's on his back while he drew them on an easel)
• Stepping on crumpled newspaper in a large ice cream bucket (to help him raise and lower his foot in place
• Throwing and catching a wiffle ball on a string (it's strung in our entrance and every boy in this house seems attracted to it as if by gravity).

She always works a bit with Paddy too and actually it is kind of nice for both of them.

Literacy Activities

I have been trying to write out things that seem to work for the little ones, partly as a form of record-keeping and partly in order to build a sort of file of activities to work on.

This is an example of one of Aidan's "journal stories" with some room below to write words, and some ideas for possible activities (mostly based on Charlotte Mason's ideas for working with nursery rhymes in order to teach reading)

Below is a sort of "album page" (I'm not sure exactly what you call these). Actually there are two pages -- one is for the story activities, and another is for variations on the "word box" activity Aidan played with me and his two older brothers last week.

I wouldn't use any of these ideas unless I thought it was something he might want to do -- I'm looking at them and sort of cringing, thinking of how I could make a fun game into torture. This is more about retrieval of possibilities when I need them ;-).

Aidan's Journalling

This is what Aidan did for a long time one evening. He was watching me write in my journal and then said he wanted to do a "reading lesson". That meant telling me stories that I could write down. It evolved to Aidan "writing" what he wanted to write (he is the one who was writing the long straight up and down lines) and then I would transcribe what he said it said.

I think this journalling is quite charming and it will be a nice record someday of what was on his mind. He actually filled about 10 pages that night -- has only asked to do it a couple of times since then so maybe it satisfied the need for the time being : ).

Reading Lesson Planning Sheet

Reading Rescue Reading Plan for Level 1 (pdf)

I just got the book Reading Rescue 1-2-3 from the library. I am not sure what I think of the reading philosophy yet, but I like some of the ideas very much. They are similar to what I've been doing with Aidan.

The book has different "levels" of readers based on a pre-test. Aidan scored in the early B stage of Level 1 (meaning that he knows all the alphabet sounds and names, but can't really read words yet) and Paddy was at the high C level (he could read the sample quite easily, but made a few mistakes).

This is a slightly changed version of the "Worksheet" which you use to plan or record lessons with the child. I like the way it's organized, though I probably would not ever manage to get either of my boys to sit and learn to read for 30 minutes! But I may use it as a sort of outline or record of what we do over time.

Literacy Lessons for my Year 1 children

I have been using this phonics book, Word Mastery (public domain) for phonics work. You can get a slightly different pdf version on Don Potter's site. From reading the teacher's instruction chapter, I don't think the first version of WM was meant to be a stand-alone. She says you can use it with any reader.

By the way, I've gotten very interested in the history of teaching literacy. I waded through many public domain primers and first readers last year, and found that very few teach "straight" phonics. Some of these 19th century books, from the day when "everyone" was literate, are straight "word-calling" type formats. They have to be, because they introduce phonetic irregulars from the first page. It is very difficult to find one that doesn't. I have to heartily admire the one-room school teachers who used these primers, often not particularly well organized or thought through IMHO, to teach such disparate crews as probably showed up at the classroom door.

Also, they taught cursive script from Day One. They wanted children to learn to read and write script from the very beginning. This idea has had a revival in modern days.

Florence Akin, who wrote the manual laid out above, thought as many past literacy experts did in her time that there should be phonics lessons taught rather separately from the regular reading lessons. In the phonics lessons you learned to decode and spell words by phonetic rules. In reading lessons you learned to read, often by using twaddly primers. Occasionally I found a primer or first reader that tried to start right in with simplified versions of literary folk tales or fables or nursery rhymes.

My grandparents are no longer alive, so I can't ask them how they learned to read. But my mother says she learned "word calling" -- the Dick and Jane type format. She said that in her day, eventually you generalized to phonics rules. She said that I learned from a mixture of phonics instruction AND sight reading. My husband learned from whole words format. He jokes that this is why he still can't attack a new word phonetically, OR spell well. It could be that he is right, who knows?

I sometimes wonder if Scout Finch's first grade teacher was a phonics enthusiast? It might explain her sour reaction to the fact that Scout showed up already reading fine just from watching Atticus Finch's finger tracing through the lines of the newspaper as he read aloud to her. The teacher complained that parents shouldn't teach their kids to read because they taught it all "wrong", but Scout said Atticus never taught her -- ever since her earliest memory she was reading.

Off the point -- anyway, I guess I came the long way to thinking that a combination is best, and Paddy at about three requested on his own that I teach him by the Atticus Finch method. He ALWAYS wanted me to trace my finger on the words as I read to him. And now he can read a little, though he prefers to listen.

Here is what I've been doing with Aidan.

I take a few of the phonetically regular words from Word Mastery and he reads a few of the words. Here it is written out already, but often I write it as I sit with him, so he is involved in the process.

Sometimes we do "rhymes" or "rimes". He is actually quite good at this -- that is, I mention a construction -- say, "AT", and then I introduce consonants "C" and he fills in the rhyme. "CAT".


Then I make up some sentences, using a few filler "sight" words so we don't end up with excrecable sentences like "Ann can nab a cat" (I'm sorry, but I just hate "phonics-prose"). Of course, you will say these sentences I am making up are nearly as twaddly and meaningless. However, there is a difference. For one thing, he is involved in the process. I am writing them out from my head, depending on his interests to some extent. For another thing, these sentences are simple but real. They make sense. I want the kids to see that words make sense. The etymology of "sentence" is the same as the etymology of "sense" -- ie, Latin sententia -- thought, meaning, judgment, perception.



Now, in Spell to Read and Write, she doesn't have them read sentences at all until they know enough words to actually read decent simple prose. I admire the principle. The problem with this for my family is that I have one special-needs child and one very young reader. Isolated word drill just does not stick in their immature memories. Nor does "deductive phonics" -- learning the rules first, then applying them. My kids are not analytical yet. I still work on the phonogram cards with them, but in a "time capsule" fashion. I do not expect it to thoroughly pay off until they are older.

And using context clues in sentences to decipher meaning is a legitimate strategy, though not meant to stand alone.

If you go to Montessori Materials, and particularly glance at the pink, green, and blue cards, you will find something that can be helpful for "single word phonics". We used these a lot last year for Aidan. They paid off in the sense that he enjoyed them and learned to do it quite well. However, it did not generalize for him. Probably he was not quite cognitively ready. And I was not using the cards in a general context -- I'm not sure how MOntessorians actually use them.

Starfall was the same -- he can do the rimes and has done them for a couple of years. But it does not generalize outward. Still, I think with a special needs child in particular, the more roads in the better. If he enjoys something connected with phonics and words, we go for it, as long as it doesn't seem to push him backwards.

This "story writing" has evolved into both my boys embarking on "story telling". After I have worked with Aidan a bit on these types of stories shown above, he wants to tell his own story. "We picked Liam up at the train station. Our car broke down...." etc. I write these down but of course, the phonics of these sentences is not yet comprehensible, so then when I read them over to him I only ask him to read the words he has a chance of being able to decipher.

After Aidan's "lesson" I usually sit down with Paddy and the completed page as shown above, and he zips through the story in about a minute. Then he asks questions about the story. Then he wants to write his own story, too. Next time I write about this, I'll take pictures of some of their stories -- I couldn't find them this time. We have papers all over the house.

Here is what Aidan did for writing last week.


My models are on the left. The one in the middle is his first attempt. You can see he doesn't know how to end his tails. This is a recurrent motor problem of his. When he was little he didn't have physical boundaries -- when we were outside, he did not naturally gravitate around me like all my other kids did. Over time, he learned to set himself boundaries, and he does it very well now.

Remembering that, I made a box and told him to try to keep the "a" inside the box. You can see it was helpful to him. He managed to curtail the tail quite effectively. His OT works with him on coloring and mazes, for the same reason.

Very long, but I wanted to write this out. It is interesting to me that I've been more "hands-off", but more "conscious" of these youngest ones' literacy process. The other kids all had different roads to literacy, but I basically used a textbook -- 100 Easy Lessons -- plus whatever else worked with them. Winging it a bit more has made me more conscious of the process, and I am wondering if this is a general truth or just that I was so busy when I was teaching the older set that I blocked much of the process out of my memory! LOL.

Language Lesson -- year 6

Intermediate Language Lessons is online, I see, on the Google Reader. This is one of those books I've had around the house for years and WANTED to use, but somehow, never could.

I was looking at it today to see if it would offer an approach to a progym-like method that would rely considerably on talking rather than just writing. The book is meant for 4th to 6th graders, so I looked at the last third of the book.

Anyway, I wrote this sort of abstracted form of the first four lessons in the third section. I was thinking that if I took the "schema" and dropped the specific models, then I could fit my own models in there instead. One of the reasons I couldn't make the book work for me in the past was that it didn't seem very integrated with what we were actually doing.

Here it is:

-----------------------
Lesson One

• Read a story about someone worthy of admiration (or the contrary). For example, a parable or a legend.
• What lesson did the author intend to impart in the story?
• Read some lines that support this.
• What good qualities did the hero show? In what actions?
• What reactions did the other characters in the story have to the action?
• How did the antagonist react, and why?
• Write an outline of the story.
• Tell the story from the outline.

----------------------------------
Lesson Two: Subject and Predicate

"The moon is very beautiful."

Explain subject and predicate.

Activity:

• Complete sentences, inventing a predicate to go with the subject.
• Complete sentences by inventing a subject for the written predicate.

(This could be an exercise drawn from the model in the first lesson, so it could be a bit like a form of narration; it is also a bit like cloze activities, which are usually used to help students read for meaning )

------------------------------------
Lesson Three:

Preparation:

• Select two poetic or literary passages, perhaps connected with the model in the first lessons.

Activity:

• Compare and contrast -- style, words chosen, and so on.
• Figure out some of the poetic or literary idioms in the passages
• Write a section from dictation, or copy a favorite part.

--------------------------------------------
Lesson Four: Review

Analyze one of the models above for punctuation. Look for:

• exclamation points
• commas
• apostrophes
• quotation marks
• capitals

Discuss why they are used in this context.

Copy out a few sentences, or have a copy ready made.

• Underline the complete subject.
• Double-underline the complete predicate.

You get the picture -- one possibility would be to have the Nativity story for the lesson One model, then some Christmas poems for the second lesson. And so on.

Paddy's Reading

I have been reading this book called Primary Reading and Literature -- up on the Baldwin Project site. I printed out a copy of this Primer by the same author. The idea is that children start right in reading "real books" rather than basal-phonics nonsense stories like "Nan ran at a rat." Charlotte Mason and Romalda Spalding (author of Writing Road to Reading) also believed that children should start right in reading meaningful things, but Harriette Treadwell's approach is more like Charlotte Mason's than Spalding's, because Spalding recommended teaching the children to write and spell a whole bunch of words before starting them on "real books" like Ten Apples up on Top.

Anyway, since Paddy is so young (four) and is much more "literature-oriented" than Aidan, I wanted to try to work with him a bit in the Treadwell style and see what happened.

Besides the Primer, here are some cards -- on the big light green one I wrote down all the words used and all the consonants and blends (using phonogram charts like this one and this one at the excellent Don Potter phonics site).

Then on the small yellow cards I wrote down all the words individually, and on the small green cards I wrote down the individual-letter phonograms. The blends are in yellow, underlined, to visually demonstrate they are blends.


The book about Teaching Reading includes two sets of lesson plans for using the primers to teach beginning reading. NOW -- the approach is a blend of "whole language" with teaching systematic phonics following closely. To me, the amateur, this approach seems to make sense. However, most of the proponents of straight phonics I have read recommend NOT confusing the child with whole word reading except in very limited circumstances. So I'm trying it with Paddy because he's very young and if I make a false step, we can take a break for a month or so and then start afresh. On the bright side, WRTR shows how almost ALL the words in the English language have logical phonetic consistency, so "whole language reading", in the homeschool, can easily go right alongside phonics explanations, if you know your phonograms.

To take an example -- Writing Road to Reading introduces "do" as one of the first five words to spell. The "o" sounds like "oo", and this is the third sound for "o" and one that is relatively uncommon. Samuel Blumenfeld, in Alphaphonics, doesn't teach this sound till much farther along. He starts in the ordinary phonics- oriented way with short vowel sounds, then some consonant blends, etc.

Sorry to go on so looong -- I suppose I am assimilating -- narrating -- as I go!

Anyway, Paddy and I had a lesson where I wrote "the little red hen" on the whiteboard and then got him to match the cards with the words on the board. He was mildly interested but not as enthusiastic as AIdan was about his pink cards. But I'm going to keep trying, about three times a week. The nice thing about a Literature approach to reading is that you can easily extend the lessons to words in his Read Alouds. Several of my kids would have absolutely hated me distracting them from the story by talking about letters and sounds, but as I've mentioned before, Paddy spontaneously asks about titles and words and asks -- DEMANDS -- for me to follow the words I'm reading with my finger as I read. So with him, I want to explore a natural approach like Scout Finch's with her father.

Paddy retelling his "Wall Story" -- this was his idea~!

Aidan's Reading

I used the Montessori pink cards with Aidan for the first time yesterday. I print them out on regular paper with our black and white laserjet, and then I put them on pink cardstock with contact paper to seal them. It takes a long time, but is soothing and I can talk on the phone or supervise the littlies' craft activities while I'm doing it.

(I chose the five highest interest ones -- VAN, GAS, CAB -- he loves cars and all things around them!-- )

I presented the cards -- asking him the second part of the Three Period Lesson -- giving him a choice between two word cards -- for ex, saying "Which card says VAN?"

He got the concept almost right away and did a great job matching the words with the pictures.

At the end he was almost up to the task of matching five sets by himself, without my prompting. He would get too excited and mismatch them sometimes, and then I would have him sound out the letters to try to give himself a clue.

NOW -- as I mentioned in an earlier post -- he doesn't really "get" sounded-out words, but this process helps him practice it and also demonstrates to him the usefulness of sounding-out. He grasped that fast too, and would "sound out" by himself even though it didn't completely help.

I noticed that in the process of working with him, I was quite naturally helping his pronunciation, so it was a phonological lesson as well as a sort of motor programming and thinking skills lesson. That is what I LOVE about open-ended methods -- there is more than one learning process going on at the same time.

Trying to match

Success!
Then I asked him to choose one word to write. I was expecting this to be less fun, but he liked it so much he asked to write several words. (I use the Writing Road to Reading "language" to help him think about the mechanics of the handwriting, but unlike WRTR, I hold him next to me and hold my hand over his very gently -- he has some spasticity and tremors and this along with his motor processing makes it very difficult for him to tell his hands and fingers what to do)

Then he wanted to paint. More letters! He can make a capital A, I, O, and X by himself now, which is definite progress from last year.


"Cooking" with playdough and the pots.