homeschooling

Categories Book Notes, Homeschool

Are We Teaching Spelling All Wrong?

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At its core, Beneath the Surface of Words by Sue Scibetta Heglund argues that we’re teaching spelling all wrong by focusing on sound to symbol correspondence. After all, even in the widely cited Hanna and Hanna paper (full text here), only about half of English words can be spelled correctly using phonetics. To focus merely on phonetics still means that a huge number of words have to simply be memorized.

I’ve been using Logic of English Essentials with my older elementary children for the past four years – and that program leans heavily into sound to symbol correspondence. I’ve seen great improvement in spelling from my dyslexic student since beginning the program – but then again, it’s also been four years with lots of growth in lots of areas! One of the hallmarks of the “sound to spell” in Logic of English is overpronouncing sounds that we normally use the schwa for in order to cement the spelling into our heads. The problem is that in order to “say-to-spell”, we need to first know the spelling. I may think “Be-ay-yu-tiful” when I say “beautiful”, but that’s because I already know how its spelling. Same with “cray-on” or “roy-al.”

In addition to the difficulty of the schwa, a sound-to-symbol approach to spelling requires the memorization of lots of words where the sound could be represented by several different phonograms. For instance, the sound /er/ can be represented by ER, IR, UR, or EAR. Logic of English teaches each of these and their frequencies (ER is the most common), but ultimately the student either needs someone or something to prompt them (“Use IR the /er/ of bird” or looking it up in a dictionary or online) or needs to memorize which /er/ is used in each word. There are dozens of other sounds that can be represented by multiple phonograms.

The reality is that English pronunciation and spelling isn’t one-to-one. Depending on the dialect, many sounds go unpronounced or are pronounced in unexpected ways. If children (and adults) are going to learn to spell well, they need something beyond JUST sound to symbol correspondence.

Enter the relatively new discipline of “Structured Word Inquiry”, which Beneath the Surface of Words (BtSoW) describes. BtSoW posits that English is not primarily a phonetic language but a morphonemic language. That is to say, spelling expresses the meaning of words beyond just the sounds of words.

As a result, to learn to spell a word, we can benefit from looking at the meanings of words and of their “morphemes” – the smaller units of words, including stems (what many of us grew up referring to as “root words”), prefixes, and suffixes. We can look at related words that use the same stems. And we can look at the etymology (the history) of the word as it moves from language to language. All these will help us understand both the meanings of the words and the way they are spelled the way they are.

Beneath the Surface of Words gives dozens of detailed examples of words that are hard to spell from a phonemic standpoint but that make sense once one has explored related words and/or etymology of a word. For example, I loved the illustration of a student who had a hard time keeping a list of literary terms straight until she analyzed “personification” and saw “person” in it. (Does that seem “well, duh” to you? That’s probably because you already have an morphophonemic understanding of each of those words – but since “person” is pronounced with the schwa as persun, a child, especially one with a language learning disability like dyslexia, may struggle to make this connection without help.) Another fun example was learning why there’s an “l” in yolk – it traces way back to Old English when the yolk (geolca) literally meant the “yellow” (geolu) part of the egg.

So am I ready to throw away or resell my Logic of English curriculum?

Nope, not at all. I still find great value in the systematic teaching of the phonetics of the English language, including the phonograms and the general rules (BtSoW would call them conventions) of spelling. Furthermore, Logic of English isn’t just spelling (maybe not even primarily spelling?) So I’ll continue using Logic of English with my elementary school students. But I’ll probably be working harder to look at and explore the morphology of the English language as we go through Logic of English together.

And for my rising middle schooler (how the time has flown!)? We’ll be doing Structured Word Inquiry to help her grow in spelling and in vocabulary as she’s encountering more and more complicated words that don’t necessarily easily translate from sound to spelling.

Categories Book Reviews

Book Review: “The Homeschool Liberation League”

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Have I ever told you about the time I decided to drop out of school?

I haven’t?

Well, let’s correct that now.

I was sixteen years old and had just finished reading Grace Llewellyn’s The Teenage Liberation Handbook (subtitled “How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education”). Llewellyn suggested an unschooling approach to education and I thought it sounded amazing. That was it. I was dropping out.

I was reminded of my teenage dropout days when I started reading Lucy Frank’s The Homeschool Liberation League, in which Katya gets fed up with school and with the person she is at school and takes a radical step: she turns around and leaves.

In camp that summer, she’d learned how much she COULD learn when she was interested in the topic she was studying–and now the mind-numbing, sleep inducing dreariness of teachers who don’t care and fellow students who only care about popularity has become too much for her. She wants to learn like she did at camp–and she thinks she has the solution.

Homeschooling.

One of the girls at camp did it, and it sounded fantastic.

So Katya’s returned home from the first day of school, determined to drop out and be homeschooled.

Now to convince her parents.

Lucy Frank says that this novel is her “tribute to the range of learning possibilities available to kids today”–and I’ll say it makes a pretty good tribute. It plays with some of the concepts many a homeschooling mom has explored–from unschooling to “school-at-home” to an “eclectic” approach to homeschooling. It shows students alternately having difficulties with and thriving under some of the many options available to kids–from public schools to charter schools to private schools to homeschool co-ops.

I didn’t get the impression that Frank is a sold-out believer in any one system of education (public/private/homeschooling/etc.)–she portrays each setting as having its own challenges and advantages, as I think she ought. Frank also does a good job of showing how different learning environments can be ideal for different students.

That being said, this isn’t a didactic book, all about different methods of learning. Really, it’s just a story–a story about a girl who wants to learn but finds that school just isn’t cutting it for her. It’s a story many of us can probably identify with.

I know I can.

After all, I was sixteen year old homeschooler who read a book about unschooling and decided to drop out of school. :-)

Katya and her parents tried a number of different approaches as they tried to figure out what was right for her–and the ultimate solution turned out to not be what any of them expected.

My dropout days didn’t quite end like I expected, either. I had goals, you see. College, a career. I wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to be a dietitian. I could drop out of “school”–but I’d still need to take chemistry at the public school like I was already doing. I’d still need to finish my trigonometry (that I was doing at home.) I still wanted to do our co-op literature class.

Basically, I could “officially” drop out of school–but it wouldn’t really change anything. Because even if I wished I could just have fun learning about this and that whenever the yen struck me, I had goals–and the program my parents and I had already come up with was designed to achieve those goals.

Maybe I’m just an idealist–but I get the idea that a student reading The Homeschool Liberation League might take it almost like I took The Teenage Liberation Handbook. They might realize that maybe school should be interesting–that maybe even they could enjoy learning. They might start to explore and to discuss with their parents the many options that are available to them as students.

And I think that’s probably a good thing.

Rating: 4 stars
Category: Young Adult Fiction
Synopsis: Katya leaves school to be homeschooled–if she can convince her parents to let her be homeschooled, that is.
Recommendation: A fun read, an interesting exploration of the many schooling options available to students nowadays. Both young adults and older adults will likely enjoy this title.

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Categories Books

Executive Summary

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My dad claims to have only finished one book in his lifetime–a Hardy Boys mystery he finished in high school.

It’s not that my dad isn’t smart. He’s just not a reader. He says he never opened his textbooks–he just attended lectures and explained things to his roommates. He’s not sure reading would have done him any good.

He loves information, loves learning, but he reads slowly, laboriously. It requires a huge amount of work from him.

So he finds other ways of getting information. He listens to lectures, podcasts, and sermons. He reads short chunks online. He listens to talk radio discussions of books. He watches the history channel or documentaries.

And occasionally, he has his children read for him.

I have always been a voracious reader. I started reading in kindergarten, and by first grade, I was sneaking out of bed to read late into the night with the light that streamed from the cracked open bedroom door.

In sixth grade, I read Plato’s Republic and had my dad borrow copies of Jonathon Edwards’ sermons from the University Library.

Shortly thereafter, I became my dad’s designated reader.

He’d buy a book, bring it home, present it to me, and inform me that he wanted an executive summary. (This, of course, was after he’d spent dinner times of my entire elementary years attempting to teach me the concept of “summary”–particularly that a summary was shorter than the original work.)

And so I’d read a book and then give Dad the summary. We’d talk about what I’d read, the ideas found within. I’d read a few quotes aloud and he’d ask questions when my summary wasn’t clear.

It was a fantastic teaching strategy–and a way for Dad to read without reading.

The only problem was that since Dad didn’t actually see the book he was “reading”, he sometimes forgot that he’d “read” it. One day, in my later teen years, he brought me home a book, Spurgeon on Prayer and Spiritual Warfare. I congratulated him on his purchase and told him that he now had a copy for himself. I had my own copy–it was one of the first books I’d summarized for him.

After I went away to college, I had other things to do and the habit of reading and discussing my reading with my dad fell by the wayside.

Until one day, I got a yen for the executive summary. I’m not sure how much my summaries enriched my dad’s mind–but I know that it had an indelible impact on me. I learn so much more when I engage the material, when I talk or write about it, when I discuss it with someone else.

So I started writing executive summaries. This time they’re on my blog. And instead of my dad, you are now my unwitting partners in learning.

Maybe Dad learned from my summaries, maybe he didn’t.

Maybe you enjoy my summaries, maybe you don’t.

But I’m gonna keep writing them, because they keep my mind alive.

(Some examples of books I’ve written executive summaries of in the past year include The Cross of Christ, Forgotten God, Unveiling Islam, and Why We Love the Church)