Spelling for Freedom

I have been thinking about how much I appreciate our spelling curriculum ever since a week ago Monday when I was picking up my raw milk and the gal behind the counter, a fellow homeschooling mom, showed me what they were doing for spelling. They are just starting out, and I think it is too soon to tell if they will be happy with it or not. However, looking over her program made me realize how the program we use is distinct from the traditional method of learning to spell.

Defining the Traditional Method

Just so we are on the same page, I think it’d be helpful to clarify what I consider to be traditional when it comes to spelling. What I mean when I say traditional spelling is that spelling is learned by memorizing lists of words. The general idea is that the words become more difficult over time.

When I was in school, spelling lessons often doubled with vocabulary lessons. So, in order to attempt a sort of integration of curriculum, I was given a list of vocabulary words. I had to memorize the definitions and the proper spelling. Each week, there was at least one test on the words. And then we moved on to the next list. If the words were words that we encountered in our textbooks, I usually remembered them, and if they weren’t, they skipped my mind until I was older and learned the words again, all by myself.

As far as I know, this is how spelling was done in one-room school houses, and this is how it is usually done today in school rooms throughout the land.

My Original Ideal

I originally thought that perhaps spelling would just “happen” as a sort of organic response to regular copywork. I have read stories about people who copied beautiful passages out of well-written books, and subsequently they could spell. Copywork was like magic.

As a basic introduction to grammar, I find that copywork has been magical. Without being taught, my son has honed his instincts. He knows how the language works, that you capitalize the first letter of a sentence and end a sentence with a period. He has gradually grasped quotation marks, commas, and semi-colons. He doesn’t know all the rules yet {I do not plan to introduce formal grammar until third or fourth grade}, but as we have discussed his mistakes, he has learned the names of all of these things over time.

When we begin formal grammar, these concepts will not be new to him; he will just be becoming better friends with them.

However, comma.

Spelling was another animal entirely. I was shocked, actually. My son was such a natural-born reader, I expected words to flow the opposite direction just as easily. But they didn’t, and the result was massive frustration during copywork. He painstakingly copied letter by letter, rather than word by word. I watched him struggle faithfully, day after day, never improving his speed by even a minute, for months.

And so, I let go of my ideal, and sought out a spelling program.

Spelling and Language Mastery

My goal in all of the lessons I give is mastery. I don’t want my children to learn to spell, per se. I want them to master the language, and spelling is a part of that. People who cannot spell have not completely mastered the language. Period. There are a few types of words that I struggle with spelling, and I know it is not because I cannot spell a particular word, but rather that there is a portion of the language that I do not fully understand.

Memorizing lists does not help us understand how the language actually works. I’m not saying this isn’t helpful, because it is in a general sense. Obviously, a person is better off being able to spell a word, in comparison with not being able to spell a word. However, lists usually contain completely disconnected words, or words that are connected, but not logically, within the context of how language actually functions, but rather associatively, through their proximity in the latest textbook.

I wanted a curriculum that built language mastery, not a list of known words. I consider this to be similar to the difference between learning to read by memorizing sight words and learning to read by understanding the phonetic foundations of English or Latin or whatever language you are learning to read. Inflected languages have a logic, and learning the logic is what is required for mastery.

How We Learn to Spell

I do not pretend that the curriculum I use is the only one out there using the nature of language as the guide for learning how to spell. I have no idea what is out there. Finding this curriculum was a happy accident. My sister used it when she was homeschooling my nephew, and she was such a big fan that she sent me the information, right when I needed it (providence!), and the rest is history. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time shopping, which is the way I like my life to be as a general rule.

Here is what we use:

Sequential Spelling 1

Now that I have used it, I can see how helpful it is to have completed all basic phonics lessons beforehand. I do wonder how this will work with my next student coming up. Perhaps we will not commence with spelling until second grade, if necessary.

For phonics, for those of you who are wondering, we use a binder method based upon my own experience as a reading tutor, with a bit of inspiration from the Bluedorns mixed in. I know nothing about the reading curriculum available on the market these days. When I teach a child to read, I keep it really, really simple. I teach diphthongs and so on as we go through the Bob Books series. It is simple, fun, and mastery-based, the way we go about it.

Looking at our spelling book, I can see how important it was to be familiar with the basic sounds before beginning, otherwise it might be too much of a struggle.

For comparison, let’s review the traditional method. I googled “spelling lists for second grade” and got a list that a school somewhere out there actually used for a week. Here are the words: eddy, entry, envy, testy, selfish, civil, ditty, giddy, silly, livid, limit.

Now, what our spelling book does is select a couple roots from which to learn to build words. Spelling is organic, and the roots are expanded and added to, as if they were growing stems and then leaves and the flowers, with longer words being built as the days go by. {Tests, by the way, are optional and not really the point.}

A few days ago, we began playing with a new root word, end. On the first day, he spelled: end, bend, lend, blend, depend, suspend, spend. There were a couple other roots also, but I’ll stick to one example here. By this time, since we’ve been doing this a while, he has had many opportunities to add letters to the beginning and endings of roots, so this all goes quickly. The next day, he starts adding the -s ending. So the words are: ends, bends, lends, blends, depends, suspends, and spends. On the day after that, he practices the past tenses: ended, bent, lent, blended, depended, suspended, and spent. I take the opportunity to reinforce his phonics as we go, and we do not do a separate reading “program” at this point. Today, he added -ing to the words and got: ending, bending, lending, blending, depending, suspending, and spending. This goes on for days and days, and next week there will be new words with a root of end that he will be building: intending, extending, amending, vending, friendlier, befriending, attending.

My son completely impressed his father by spelling misunderstanding the other day, but what I took away from that is that understanding the logic of the language means that a long word like misunderstanding is no more intimidating that a smaller word like stand or and because all of the words go together.

We often joke that most words are like Legoes. You start with one block and make them bigger and bigger, but in the end, at the root of it all, is still that one little block that started it all.

Result: Freedom

This takes twenty minutes a day, unless someone gets a dirty diaper. My son understands the language better. His copywork is faster. He can spell words we haven’t studied because we are learning logic, not lists. {As a general rule, the only words we spell more than once are words that don’t fit the logic, like the word eyes.} Being familiar with the nature of the language helps him understand other words, and I have no fear that he won’t know a word just because I haven’t taught it to him.

This isn’t a Charlotte Mason-style of learning, I don’t think. {I must plead ignorance because I don’t remember much of what she said about spelling except that we shouldn’t let a child sit and stare at a word spelled incorrectly.} However, I do think that this method respects the living nature of language. It brings all things back together, in a sense. Now, words are not individual unrelated symbols, but rather groupings of letters that make sense, and we can play with them and build different words using the same foundation, and in a flash we realize that our language is not chaotic and confusing, but rather possessing of a nature that is accessible to us, able to be understood by even some of our youngest members.