Strike While The Iron Is Hot

As I write, Luke is dictating an idea for a game he's had to his Dad. He is so excited, he is pacing and breathless, speaking faster than his dad can write. It's been a long time since I've seen him like this.


Owen is excited too; now, it's his turn to tell Dad all about the dragons that are going to be in his game.


It's really this excitement that I wanted to blog about tonight. We have had kind of a blah day, cooped up in the house with freezing rain and grayness outside, Luke and I both with headaches and all three of us with an unsatisfy-able sweet tooth. It looked like we were going to have an evening with much of the same, and then – a eureka moment!

We got to talking about making our own games, even making a company that would sell our games, and it sparked something new in both children. I mean, they've been excited about things, but this was different. You could see the possibilities dawning on their faces, especially Luke.

At one point he was so emotional he could hardly speak; when he found his voice, he asked, "what if we fail?" I told him that I don't think of it as failing, and instead if we end up not reaching our goal, we would still have learned lots, and that what we learn would take us through future ventures. I told him, I try to think in terms of learning versus succeeding or failing. He had been so upset, I was frankly a little surprised when he perked right up and asked for a notebook, a pencil, and some time on the computer.

Now, he is asking for a different notebook that he can take up to bed with him to write more ideas; Owen just came in to kiss me good night and as he was leaving he asked, "Mom, how do you start a company?"

I told him I was just about to look into it.

The Evolution of Writing

Owen is writing, and it is soooo cute.

But it's more than just cute. There is also something profound in these first clumsy attempts at written communication. My heart speeds up when I watch him shape letters, I marvel over what he perceives as so important that it must be written down. Here, other than his name, is the first document Owen's ever written himself:



It is about dwarfs, and what they do, and what they require to do what they do. Because someday, when he's old enough, Owen plans to play Dungeons and Dragons as a dwarf, and he's going to need the information on this sheet.
If you study the letters closely, you will see that he traced quite a few of them from dots that I put on the paper. Also, the words, where you can make them out, are spelled correctly; this is because he asked me how to spell the words and I told him.
But check out this next sample, the name of a store he and Luke are starting up for Poke (like Pokemon, pronounce Po-Kay) York:



It's called The Brothers Pom Pom Store, and they're planning on making pom-poms to sell, for Monopoly money, in Poke York for the Pokemon who live there. (Want to see Poke York? Click here.) You'll notice that 'Brothers' is spelled unconventionally, as is 'store.' Also, the letters are totally of his formation, not tracings of my letters.
When Luke saw this sign, I knew that he might question the mistakes. So I asked him to help Owen learn to write in the way that I wished he had learned to write: by trying to figure out which letters make which sounds to him, even if it doesn't make sense to the rest of us. Luke happily agreed, and I think he is enjoying being a teacher, even in a subject he's not all that confident in himself. Or, maybe it's because of his own lack of confidence.

In this latest sample, you can really see the evolution of Owen's writing - from me telling him what and how to write, to him sounding things out and writing them himself:



The drawing is mostly mine, but the letters that spell 'Pikachu' are all Owen's. They are, in order: P, K, E, D, E. And he sounded out the sounds in the word 'Pikachu' to get to those letters. So although it's barely legible, it is the one with the most personal meaning to him.

Being there at the very beginning of real attempts at written communication, especially when you can see how meaningful it is for the new writer, is one of the biggest joys of homeschooling so far. I can't wait to see what he writes next!

Not Hooked on Phonics

Recently, I was thinking about Luke's last school teacher, just before he left 2nd grade, telling me about new research that showed kids retain spelling better when they memorize it properly the first time, kind of the direct opposite of inventive spelling.

At the time, I thought only of making Luke's school life a little easier, by stopping the memorization of 'sight' words. He was supposed to have memorized about 100 of these by the end of 1st grade, and the pressure on him to 'practice these every night' and have them committed to memory was making him sick - really, really sick. We're talking night terrors at least 5 nights out of each week, migraine headaches, and weight loss - Luke lost 20% of his body weight in 1st grade. By the time his problems started up again in fall of 2nd grade, after taking the summer off, I didn't care so much about how many sight words he had memorized, I just wanted him to stop feeling bad.

But, because his teacher had this new research, I put aside my education, all I was taught about how kids learn in many different ways, everything I had experienced in learning to write myself - I used inventive spelling until at least 3rd grade, and I'm one of the best spellers I know - and allowed her to persuade me that this decision about my son's learning was for the best.

Needless to say, it was the wrong decision. And now, happily, we've rectified it.

What matters more than children's ability to spell each word properly is fostering their creative spark, the one that will get them interested in lifelong writing and reading. As a homeschooler, Luke reads voraciously, and spelling doesn't hinder him from reading books, graphs, selected Newsweek and newspaper articles, even books written for adults. (A fact that I'm sure confounds teachers everywhere - how can an 8 year-old kid read at a high school level, but be unable to spell!)

Recently I decided to look up this research and see it for myself. Here is what I found: an article which 'critiques' inventive spelling. My reading of it gives only one valid (from the author's point of view, anyway) criticism, that teachers do not have enough time in the day to decode children's inventive spelling. And, my thought on that is: some things you just can't rush, and one of them is written communication.

But what really galls me is the author's position that there is only one method by which children will learn to spell, and write, correctly, and this is phonics. He puts the fear of God into parents that should their children be exposed to "Whole Language" (in quotes, of course, like any radically ludicrous idea) they will suffer from an inability to write or spell, pretty much ever.

Next, I wandered down to the bottom of the page and clicked the 'home' link; it brought me here, to the home of The National Right to Read Foundation. And, hey ho, guess what they're selling? Yep, phonics stuff. Their mission statement reads, in part, "Explicit and systematic instruction in phonics is a non-negotiable component of comprehensive reading instruction." The italics are theirs, showing how very much they want to drive home this point.

Now, I can see the value of some phonics instruction, for some kids. But to state that phonics is non-negotiable, even for kids (like mine) who learn, as it were, by osmosis, that statement is a death sentence: learn these rules, or you'll never learn to read. It's simply not true, as many thousands of kids are learning the hard way.

Why not expose kids to both phonics and whole language? That way, if they learn better one way than the other, at least they'll still learn. Kids don't need to memorize sight words to read, and Luke is a living example of this.

As a wise yoga instructor I know says, "Take what you need, and leave the rest."

Authorship

It looks like my computer time from here on out will be limited: we have an 8 year-old author in the house.

After years of avoiding even the slightest whiff of writing, Luke has started a book. On the computer. Because I suggested it!

I think that what this means is, he has mostly gotten "school" out of his system - he had to take a long break from any writing except of the briefest kind, like holiday and birthday wish lists or notes to his favorite Harry Potter characters.

The book itself, "The Defeat of Chairman Drek," all one page of it so far, is a corker, which I think can be expected from a child who has spent years absorbing the conventions of writing through reading. Luke's dialogue exchanges, settings, plot and characters - taken from a video game (of course) - are pretty good, kind of stoic and adventuresome and read like, well, a real book. He has figured out a way to be as eloquent on paper as he is verbally, and seeing how he structures his writing is like looking at how his mind works from another angle.

We do have some confusing exchanges, though, with questions such as, 'Mom, where's the little two dots thing that you use?' or 'I can't find the thing that separates the ideas but keeps the same sentence.' Or, 'where's the two lines that mean somebody is talking?'

The one frustration I've felt is over Luke's inability to let something be misspelled, even for a few minutes. He hates inventive spelling, and just can't abide those little red lines underneath the words - and I can't figure out how to shut off the spell-checker so that he can write in peace! He loses thoughts and phrases while trying to figure out how to spell, rather than letting this be a 'draft' and sorting out the spelling later. My heart goes out to him, my young perfectionist.

For the most part, though, it's kind of cool having a young writer in the house, and his ideas and enthusiasm amaze me.

Even though I don't have the computer to myself anymore.

On Writing

Back before we started this whole homeschooling thing, Luke's anxiety about school was largely due to the copious amounts of writing required of him in Kindergarten, First, and Second grade. We would get notes home about how he was unable to work independently, more likely to be staring off into space than getting his jobs done, unable to get to the "fun" stuff because he couldn't concentrate. For us at home, who could not tear Luke away from projects and books he was really interested in even to come and eat dinner, this was mind-boggling; how could he possibly be unable to focus?

The answer, it turned out, was two-fold. First, he concentrates wonderfully, on stuff he's interested in. Two, he is emphatically not interested in writing.

Our first months of homeschooling passed, with parents making no demands upon his time, and Luke reading anything he could get his hands on, asking questions, exploring, playing, conversing. So long as he didn't have to write, he was happy - but I worried, especially on those rare occasions when Luke would write something and find he'd forgotten how to make, for example, a three. I kept my concerns to myself and gave Luke as much time as needed, mainly because my gut told me to. But sometimes it was hard.

Then, a funny thing happened: he began to write spontaneously. Lists, letters to his favorite Harry Potter characters, an accounting of his allowance money and how it gets spent are all part of Luke's repertoire. Not coincidentally, these are all topics of great interest to him.

Last Friday, I read this great post about teaching writing at my blogosphere-friend Jena's page, Yarns of the Heart. Jena is more towards the graduation end of homeschooling, with one in college and two younger teens, so reading about how she handled 'school' when they were small has been wonderful, and very reassuring.

Jena writes, "Here are some specifics for today's student:

1. Let them read.

2. Let them think and express opinions about what they read.

3. Respect their opinions and insights so they will feel the freedom to talk honestly with you.

4. Share your own insights and wonder at a writer's ability to communicate.

5. Don't kill the fun of writing by pointing out spelling or grammar mistakes all the time."

Since reading this post, I have stopped worrying; this list is, quite literally, how Luke spends his days.

Already, he's a capable, intelligent boy. Our hope is that he will grow up to use writing as a communication tool, a written extension of his voice.

Personally, I don't think he will be able to help it; communication, just like Harry Potter or his allowance, is of great interest to him.

Twelve Days of Summer...

Day 3

Today's book is Kids Have All the Write Stuff by Sharon Edwards and Robert Maloy. Homeschooling or not, this book will help you enjoy writing with your children!

Today's picture: