Spelling Troubles

I knew that someday invented spelling (or as I like to call it - creative spelling) would show its ugly results to us at some point. But I had hoped that with using phonics to teach my daughter to read the spelling would fall into line as we went along. But as with all my other trusting beliefs with regard to my daughter's education, this too has proven to be naive at best.

And, it is even more clear now just how much the school's endless week by week spelling lists for the kids to memorize have really done nothing to help. It is so bad that there have even been words on the list for which my daughter did not know the meaning. For instance, the following are my favorites: earnest, yearn, mourn, pioneer, and peer. There are also words on the list that are homonyms with other words, but the other words are not on the list for the students to make the comparison and connection. I have to admit in some of the lists, the words do have patterns to them. But I'm not so sure that these patterns are explained in the class, or if the kids are supposed to learn the significance of the patterns by osmosis as it appears they are expected to learn how to read. I do know that at least they did learn about removing the -y from certain words to add -ies as my daughter explained it one night - and I was pleased.

I don't think I have mentioned it before but at parent teacher conferences, my daughter's teacher informed us for the first time of her concern that my daughter can not spell in her writing when she's writing research reports and stories (in 2nd grade). But it was not that she didn't spell correctly per se, but that she did not incorrectly spell words clearly enough that the teacher could figure them out. The teacher showed me some examples and I could see what she meant. Then she asked me to work with my daughter with regard to her writing and spelling, including the following, in addition to the spelling issues: how to properly indent, write alongside the margin and break her writing into paragraphs either).

So, I've been wondering how I am to go about helping my daughter learn to spell correctly. I started trying to work with her a bit by having her say the words to herself and then spell them. But I don't know what words to give her to work on to most efficiently and effectively help my daughter.

So I went to our local parent/teacher supply store looking for some helpful workbooks. But all I could find were books with random type lists like the ones the school uses and books that go through the phonics rules, which are just repetitive our reading efforts and obviously not what we need. Nowhere did I find a book that covered rules like "i before e except after c."

I have also been at a loss because its one thing to work on a problem after you've examined the symptoms and determined the likely cause. It's another when you're dealing with kids being told to spell however they want and trying to figure out what your child is specifically missing that prevents her from spelling things incorrectly but still recognizably (I know that sounds strange, but that's just how it is, unfortunately). If, for instance, I knew that there were certain types of words giving her trouble, I could isolate that problem and work on those types of words with the appropriate tools. But it's really like everything else connected with these haphazard, new ways of teaching. There's no systematic approach but instead, it's just tossed at the kids with the expectation that they will somehow learn by osmosis.

So that brought me to the Internet and I found this wonderful site that goes through the various spelling patterns (which you might call rules) ---

http://www.lewrockwell.com/taylor/taylor79.html

As with phonics, there are exceptions to these spelling rules, but the rules do work often enough to help a person spell many words correctly. I will also be looking for other resources, but this site seems to be a great start!

Somehow I have to figure out how to break these rules up into my own lesson plans and see if I can deliver it to my daughter in an interesting but educational way. I also can't overwhelm here with these all at once, so I have to figure out how to systematically teach it in manageable portions. Why oh why can't the teachers be doing this (as an aside, I'm not blaming it on the teachers - in our school district the district basically takes the discretion away from the teachers and tells them how to teach so it's supposedly uniform between all the elementary schools, so its not entirely the teachers' faults.)???

Btw, I realize that I am writing based upon my own personal experiences with one school and there may be schools out there that are doing a fantastic job. But from what I've been reading on other websites and other blogs, I know I am not alone with these challenges.

I realize this has been a long post...but one more thing.... At the same time that I am going to be working on these spelling issues with my daughter, I am working on reading with my son with phonetics and working on his letter writing (the actual forming of the letters) to get him more confident to write the stories that the school expects him to write after only a little more than 4 months in school, and no idea how really to spell (and he's smart enough to realize he really can't spell).