Spelling

We will not be doing any "formal" spelling curriculum until Ali is a couple years older, but I am continually surprised at how well he picks up new words from his readings.

-Right now we are in this phase of Spelling:

• Notice the Spelling (Practice Writing)
  Once your child is past the beginning-reading-lessons stage and is just reading aloud to practice, and is past the learning-how-to-write-the-letters stage and is just doing copywork to practice and gain fluency, you can use his copywork to continue encouraging him to look at how words are spelled. An easy way to do this is, when he has finished copying the line (or two lines) for today, ask him how one or two of those words is spelled. Let him know beforehand that you will be asking for a spelling or two. That consistent, gentle expectation will do much to motivate him to keep alert and notice spellings of words even as he practices beautiful penmanship. It is a simple technique that will continue cultivating that important habit of learning spelling in context.

The step after this is

• Prepared Dictation (Grades 4–12)
  Once your child is nine or ten years old(*I might start earlier, like 8), you can take the next step and increase the expectation with prepared dictation. Here’s how it works. Select a passage from a good living book or a beautiful poem or Scripture, just as you do for copywork. But now have your child read through it and identify the words he doesn’t already know how to spell. Those are the words he should study. Once he is sure he knows how to spell all of the words in the passage, dictate it to him a phrase at a time (saying each phrase only once) and watch as he writes to make sure he is spelling every word correctly. As he gains experience in prepared dictation, you can add the responsibility of learning the capitalization and punctuation too.

He has worked the greater part of last week on a game he made up called "Dragon Seige". However, I had to ask him to read it for me, as to tell the difference between which words were spelled incorrectly and which words he made up.

For example here the word "defense" is spelled with a "c" instead of an "s".

 But here he has made up the word "Prayzar" and "Prayntine" not "PraytiMe".

Here he spelled "half" as "Halaf" and "Archer" as "Archerer" but Archyver is the name of a different guy all together.

Another thing Ali has taken up to is inventing new fragrances. He's come up with over a dozen, with unique notes, bottle, and descriptions. It's hysterical. Here he has written everything except the last sentence when he asked his Daddy, "How do you spell, sophisticated man?".

We wrote to one of our fragrance "guru's" and emailed her Ali's artwork, she was tickled and said she might publish it on her blog.


As for Math, we've been working slowly through addition. Checking off the numbers he is comfortable with. The last week we have worked on 8+ and 9+ and are ready to move on soon.