Nighttime Spelling
September 25th, 2005 at 12:42 am (Unschooling Life)
Kenzie has been reading voraciously for over three years now, but he’s never felt confident spelling. Instead, he’s become adept at finding what he wants to spell so he can copy it, and several times a day, he asks me to spell words for him - for lists he makes, for computer searches, for captions to his ever-growing number of drawings….
Tonight, while filling in a new Pokemon book, he came up to me several times asking how to spell various things. He wanted to know the abbreviation for September, and I told him, "S-E-P-T." He disappeared for a moment, only to rush almost immediately back. "I know how to spell the whole September! S-E-P-T-E-M-B-E-R!" he proudly announced. "I spelled a really big word!" He then asked me to give him words to spell, and over the next half hour he spelled: baker, game, master, globe, clock, sing, bookcase, puppy, floor, flower, dinosaur, hands, giver, child, children, shrub, tree, mushroom, popcorn, water, pepper, wooden, belly, plate, platter, glass, power, bowl, pole, frame, soup, handle, magazine, hair, fear, table, noise, have and company.
He needed very little help from me, and it was almost breathtaking to see him spelling out words with double letters, silent letters, diphthongs and exceptions-to-the-rule without missing a beat. Amazing. He’s disappeared again into the bedroom to work on his Pokemon guide. It’s about 12:30 in the morning. God, how I love middle-of-the-night unschooling adventures!