Why Creative Spelling Is Not Wrong

In educational and homeschooling circles, there can be some pretty heated debate on the topic of creative spelling. ("Creative spelling" is allowing a child who is just learning to write/read to spell things how they think they might be spelled and not correct them.)

Here's what I love about creative spelling:

1. It allows for independent writing. My six-year-old can experiment with writing, making lists and maps and messages used in her various imaginative games, without needing to ask me "how do I spell...?" This gives her a real sense of ownership, making words and letters tools of play and not just school.

2. It gives my student a chance to demonstrate her understanding of the phonics rules we've learned so far. Trying to sound out a long word and write down the sounds she hears is a fabulous mental exercise, and tells me which rules need review and which have been mastered.

3. It provides an accurate snapshot of where she is with her language skills. When I look back at a paper from two months ago and compare it to today's, I can really see how much her facility with words has grown.



Now, to be clear, I do espouse a lot of the principles of classical education, and our homeschool curriculum looks more classical than anything else. And classical education does tend to discourage creative spelling, from what I've seen. I understand the reasoning behind it -- if mistakes are not corrected, the student starts to think that their "creative" spellings are the real spellings and that can be a bear to correct down the line.

We address that concern in several ways:

1. We learn phonics and spelling rules, so that over time those rules are incorporated into the creatively spelled words. It turns out that there are very few true exceptions to phonics rules, as long as you learn all of them, so eventually you will have the tools to correctly spell just about any word without ever having memorized a sight word.

2. We read a lot. For the typical non-dyslexic student, the best way to teach spelling is to read read read read read. Having seen the word correctly spelled a zillion times, the child inadvertently memorizes it (again, without flash cards or conscious memorizing) and can recall it at will.

3. We do practice writing every week, both in copywork and in our weekly letter to a friend or family member, that does use only correct spelling.

I am a vigilant defender of correct spelling and grammar. And I do strongly believe that children need to learn the right way to write and speak if they are to be taken seriously as adults. But along the path to that ultimate goal, creative spelling does have an important place.

Sound Science

This week, our science topic is "sound." We're learning a little bit about how sound travels, the silence of outer space, and demonstrating how the human ear works. Today we did two really fun experiments out of our new book,The Usborne Big Book of Experiments.



The first was to build a two-cups-and-a-length-of-string-a-phone. Which probably has a better name than that, but you get the gist. The kiddos were amazed that it actually worked. The particularly neat thing was that they could literally feel the vibrations of the string, which was a great demonstration of sound waves.



The second involved building a sort of makeshift drum, and then using the air vibrations created by the tapping of the drum to blow out a candle. I couldn't even count the number of times we relit the candle and repeated this experiment. A winner for sure!

A Closer Look

We have the coolest new toy. For months now, I've been wanting to get a simple microscope. No preparing of slides, no mega-powered lenses, just a simple tool for looking closely at stuff. So I saw a good review for the Zorb in a homeschooling resource catalog, and thought that sounded just about right. It's small, it connects directly to the computer, and you can save pictures of what you see. Cool.



Then I saw it was only $29 at Amazon and clicked "Buy Now." An impulse buy, to be sure.

Hey, sometimes I have good instincts.

Man, this thing is cool. I mean, cool. I can't even tell you how many lightbulb moments we've had around here in the past few days. And not just from the kids! Even my husband confessed that only now does he truly understand the difference between woven and knit fabric.

See? Woven:



And knit:



At 35x magnification, those fabrics look really, really different.

You know how a strawberry has its seeds on its skin? Yeah, they look like this:



Ever wondered how sharp a thumbtack really is? It's this sharp:



And granulated sugar really is made up of little crystals.



It's amazing how much knowledge can be right in front of you, if only you take a closer look.

A Day in the Life of Our Homeschool

We've been dabbling here and there through the summer in our kindergarten lessons, getting a feel for each subject and curriculum in a low-pressure, fun way. But I was getting nervous about how it was all going to come together when we had to really sit down and "do school" for more than just a half hour at a time. So I planned this week to be our first "official" week of school, so we have time to see what works (and what doesn't!) and tweak the schedule before Fall. Also, big sister is away at the beach, so we won't be tempted to pester irritate play with her instead of buckling down.

So since today was our first day of doing a full day of school, I thought I'd share what a day in the life of our brand-spankin'-new homeschool looks like. Veterans, feel free to laugh heartily at my inevitable hubris, but so far it seems to be going really well!

If you don't hear from me again by next week, send help.

Here's how our day played out, roughly speaking...

7:00 AM - Both kids were up and we made our way downstairs. They both immediately seized the rulers I bought yesterday (and craftily left on the kitchen table, all part of my master plan, mwahahaha), and ran off to measure everything in the house. Listening to the two-year-old shout out "One... two... three... EIGHTEEN INCHES!" was priceless.



7:30 AM - They wandered back into the kitchen in search of breakfast. Thankfully, by this time I had made my coffee, retrieved my newspaper, and employed one of my favorite tricks for ensuring a peaceful start to the day. I'd covered the kitchen table with paper and set out markers and colored pencils.



Inevitably, this leads to at least a full half hour for me to wake up, read the paper, and drink my coffee. Essential to everyone's sanity.



Ahhh. I also looked over the plan I'd made for our week. I figure planning out every hour of every day is a level of detail that feels too rigid for me. However, flying by the seat of my pants feels a little too loosey-goosey. So I came up with a weekly plan, so each day can unfold as it may, but I have an idea of what we need to accomplish in order to stay on track. It's stapled to the inside of a folder in which I have already copied all the worksheets, etc. that we'll need for the week. I think this will work well for our style, but I'm sure it will require tweaking until it fits just right.



So while we were also eating breakfast (and some of us were getting appropriately caffeinated), our resident kindergartener was illustrating (and narrating, I might add) a Lion King-based story so elaborate, it would make your head spin. Pretty cool.



8:30 AM - We headed upstairs for me to shower and us all to get dressed and ready to take on the day. The kiddos get to watch a show while I'm in the shower, a routine that evolved when I was still trying to keep a young toddler from unrolling the whole roll of toilet paper and other such nonsense while I was otherwise engaged. But hey, it's Backyardigans! Who doesn't love the Backyardigans?



9:00 AM - Report to the schoolroom! Okay, it's not a schoolroom. It's just the family room. But I put all our school stuff in this corner, so at least it's not exploding all over the house. For now. In reality, we "do school" all over the house, but I love having a home for all our books and manipulatives and such.



For instance, we often do math on the floor. I don't know why, she says she thinks better on the floor...? Whatever, as long as she's focusing, I really don't care. By the way, we are using RightStart math (level A), and so far love love love it.



Little brother loves the geoboards. Which worked out well, since we didn't need them for this lesson. Shh, don't tell him he's just playing! He will tell you quite seriously that he is "doing math too!"



Had to move to the coffee table for our rectangles activity...



9:30 AM - Math was over, and the two-year-old was getting restless (and distracting). So we attempted to watch an Eyewitness DVD about plants, which is our science subject for the week. There was a lot of horsing around and not a whole lot of paying attention, but this just tells me that they needed to let off steam. No worries, they both had a few "hey, that's a cool plant!" moments, so I'm gonna call it good.

We talked about the parts of a plant, which she already knows (the kid's a gardener, after all), so she colored and labeled a worksheet.



By the end, there was a major case of wiggling going on, so I declared recess.



10:30 AM - Bike ride to the playground!



Snack under a tree!



Our daily dose of Vitamin D, as well as some much needed running around time. Amazing how much calmer and focused they were when we returned.

11:15 AM - Reading time on the couch. I selected the book about plants, but then they each chose a few others to add to the pile.



11:45 AM - Free play for the kiddos while I make lunch. Spaghetti and meatballs was requested, and since I didn't have any bread to make sandwiches, I didn't have an easy alternative to offer. So spaghetti and meatballs it was.



Yum.

12:15 PM - Lunch. During lunch, I read them a poem I had printed out: Robert Louis Stevenson's "Bed in Summer." It's about the unfairness of having to go to bed when it's still light out. They loved it. The two-year-old asked me to read it over and over and over. Then the five-year-old grabbed the paper and read it herself a few times (based on a combination of memory and sounding-out). Very fun.



12:45 PM - Time for the two-year-old's nap. We went upstairs and read a couple of books. As usual, the five-year-old said goodnight to him by declaring him to be the "best brother in the whole wide universe," and he fell asleep to his CD of folk songs from Appalachia.

1:00 PM - With little brother asleep, it was time to really focus. Phonics time. The program we are using is called All About Spelling, and was initially developed as a spelling program, but a lot of people also use it for phonics. It's a wonderful curriculum, and we have both really enjoyed using it. But it does take focus. And time. I think it took us an hour to work through the lesson, but it was worth it. It's meaty stuff.



2:00 PM - Time to unwind a bit. We have been reading the second Harry Potter book for the past few weeks, and really needed to get past the scary part. (Note to self: do not stop reading at a point where a child may be in danger. You will get woken in the middle of the night by a child having a basilisk nightmare.) We read for over an hour, and were able to get everyone safely out of the Chamber of Secrets... phew!



3:15 PM - Little brother woke up from his nap, and wanted to join in on the reading fun. So we spent the next 45 minutes reading picture books on the couch.

4:00 PM - Tea time, otherwise known as afternoon snack. (The kids get decaf tea that is more milk than tea, but they adore having tea just like Mommy.) They watched a few videos from the They Might Be Giants Here Comes Science album, and we talked some more about photosynthesis.



And that was our day! I can't wait until tomorrow.

Where do you go to school?

It's that time.

Kindergarten. We got a little extra time due to a fall birthday, but this fall my five-year-old and her friends will be marching off to kindergarten.



It just turns out that our girl won't be marching all that far.

The kitchen table, to be exact.

Yes, while our eldest is gearing up to begin her senior year in high school, we have decided to homeschool the kindergartner.

Some days I'm overwhelmed by what I've taken on, but I am also truly exhilarated by the possibilities. I am so excited about this journey we've begun. It seems such a natural extension of our family culture, that it's funny to think how biased I was against homeschooling just a few years ago.

Just one of the many benefits I've seen so far: continuity. I know exactly what it is my girl is working on, what she needs to practice, and the learning comes with us wherever we go.



All the way to the woods and the sea.

Number Word Matching Game

One of the concepts I'm working on with my five-year-old right now is number sense. We are doing a lot with manipulatives, including an abacus, to build an intuitive sense for numbers. Meanwhile, she is also in the beginning stages of reading and finding that number words can be some pretty tricky fellows. (I mean seriously, "two"? "eight"? "one"? Who came up with these spellings??)



So I came up with the following game to help reinforce the association between the actual quantity represented by a numeral, and the appropriate number word.

The game board has dots representing the quantities one through ten, in order across the board. Then I gave her a set of cards, mixed up, that each had a number word printed on it. She just had to put the word cards on top of the corresponding quantity. And that's it!



Okay, might seem boring, but she got a real kick out of it, and it's a quick little exercise to keep building her familiarity with number words. And a little more engaging than flash cards. I think if we play this little game every day for a week or two, she'll have those number words down cold.

Of course the first thing she did was to annotate the game board with the appropriate numerals. (Backwards.) Hey, it's all learnin'...



The game board and cards are available as PDF's for your downloading pleasure. I recommend printing them on card stock. Just cut out the cards, and voilà! You can match up your numbers and words with the best of 'em.

Nature Journaling

Before I started reading the blogs of homeschoolers, I'd never even heard of nature journaling. But apparently it's been around for a while. Charlotte Mason, the 19th century British educator, was a big proponent of it. I kept hearing about it as a way to connect kids to nature, to encourage them to closely observe the natural world around them. We already go on nature walks all the time, so I thought this would be pretty easy to add into our routine. Last week I picked up a large sketchbook and some high-quality colored pencils, and explained the idea very briefly to the five-year-old.



She ran with it. This child is not just a nature-lover; she is a scientist. The opportunity to record her observations was what really sucked her in. I am absolutely loving flipping through her journal and seeing her sketches.



But what was unexpected was how the journaling has changed our nature walks. Our usual routine had been to simple clomp along, stopping briefly to say "hey, look at that!" or pick something up, and continue on our merry way. But last week (on Earth Day), as we were clomping along picking up litter in the neighborhood, we spotted a bird's nest. Nestled in the crook of a tree, low enough for me to peer inside and see it was empty. Of course, we needed to sketch it! So we stopped, and we stayed by that bird's nest for a good 15 minutes.



As it turns out, 15 minutes is a long time. And there I stood, with nothing to do besides watch the children sketch (the two-year-old got into the act too), and study the bird's nest.



What a gift.



So I'd like to give a big bouquet of thank you to the many bloggers who shared their family's nature journals and inspired me to give this a go. I can't tell you how grateful I am every day for the inspiration and encouragement shared by this community.

This post is part of the Moms' 30-Minute Blog Challenge, hosted every Tuesday by Jamie over at SteadyMom.