Given her struggles with spelling, word play games on the English language are not Jemimah's idea of a fun way of whiling away a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Her daddy and I, on the other hand, gain a great deal of pleasure in playing with, and discussing, words and language. The amusing quirks, absurdities and oddities of our own English language and its pronunciation and spelling will never cease to amuse us. Yes, yes, I know: small minds, and all that.
My niece, the beautiful 13 year old Princess Mini-me, is wired the same way as I am, hence her blog name. Our families often joke that she is really my daughter, whilst Jemimah, who is my sister's clone, belongs with them. Princess Mini-me acts like me, looks like me, is wonderful like me. Jemimah, on the other hand...well, she is wonderful too, and I wouldn't swap her for the world. But if I did, it would be for Mini-me. I digress. (How often I type those words on this blog).
One Sunday afternoon recently, Mini-me was a hanging with the adults, as befits a 13 yo first child. Ahem. Anyhow, the talk turned to language as it often does, and I realised that the Princess didn't know how to pronounce ghoti. What a failure in her education - she needed to be enlightened immediately!
Being a diligent and obsessively competitive child, she approached the task with determination and will, and finally managed, with much help, to pronounce the word as we all know it should be said, not a goatee like the beard, but ghoti as in fish.
Of course, Jemimah with her keen homeschooler's knowledge of spelling rules would have known, had she bothered to hang around the adults - which she didn't, that it is only gh at the end of a word that says 'f', and ti at the end of a word never says 'sh', but that would ruin the fun, and anyhow, we know for sure that spelling rules are only made to be broken.
Although he didn't mention ghoti, the Dutch teacher,Gerard Nolst Trenité, recognised this absurdity of English spelling when he wrote his wonderful poem, The Chaos, back in the 1920s. The poem contains about 800 examples of irregular pronunciation written in mostly clever rhyming couplets, and is most sublime fun to read aloud.
Here is the beginning:
Dearest creature in Creation, Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you'll tear; So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer.
Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word. Sword and sward, retain and Britain (Mind the latter, how it's written!) Made has not the sound of bade, Say-said, pay-paid, laid, but plaid.
Now I surely will not plague you With such words as vague and ague, But be careful how you speak, Say break, steak, but bleak and streak. Previous, precious, fuchsia, via; Pipe, snipe, recipe and choir, Cloven, oven; how and low; Script, receipt; shoe, poem, toe.
If you're after the rest of the poem, which I'm sure you will be, you'll find it here. Such excellent word fun, it is.
I tried reading The Chaos aloud to my audience, but even my Beloved tired of listening after the first six or seven verses.
Princess Mini-me had left the erudite company of grown-ups by then.
Okay, so now I need to post the lyrics to this one. Despite Jemimah's spelling problems, she has no worries with Mississippi. Only problem is that she - and I - need to sing the song first!!
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I
When I was seven years of age I used to go to school, And when it came to spelling I was awful as a rule;
I couldn't spell a single word when "S"s were concerned, I've tried to overcome my lisp and success came in return.
Now that word "Mississippi" was awful hard to spell But now I will convince you that I can spell it well:
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I That used to be so hard to spell; It used to make me cry, But since I've studied spelling, It's just like pumpkin pie: M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I.
A lot of words would puzzle me - "bananas" was no cinch, "Sas-a-pa-ril-a," that was hard, 'though I'd spell it in a pinch;
But words like "Cincinnati", "psychological" and such, Gee, when it came to spelling those, I surely was in Dutch.
I can't spell "Cinderella," and "sausages," that's tough, But I can spell "Mississippi", and believe me, that's enough.
Jemimah and I play a lot of Scrabble. Do you know why?
Because we both win every game. That's why.
Discover how we manage this in the latest Literacy Lava, out today.
The 9th edition of this great free mag is literally bubbling over with great ideas for helping our kids build their reading, writing...and spelling skills. I particularly like Rebecca Newman's ideas for mapping - we will definitely be embracing our inner pirates around here this week. Joyce Grant and Jen Robinson's reasons why adults should read children's literature offer food for thought as well.
Grab your free copy right now. Perhaps you'd like to discover your inner pirate as well!
While you're over at the fantasmagorical Book Chook's site, pick up a copy of her mini e-book, Literacy in the Playground. It's full of skipping and clapping rhymes, chants and songs and it is really good nostalgic fun. I reckon it is anyhow!
The gift of spelling depends upon the power the eye possesses to 'take' (in a photographic sense) a detailed picture of a word; and this is a power and habit which must be cultivated in children from the first. When they have read 'cat,' they must be encouraged to see the word with their eyes shut, and the same habit will enable them to image 'Thermopylae.' This picturing of words upon the retina appears to be to be the only royal road to spelling...
Charlotte Mason Home Education p 240
Quick! Hide me! The Ambleside Online Police may be knocking on my door some time in the next few weeks. I have strayed from the curriculum. I have failed them. I have gone my own way.
But only a little bit...honest, Officer!
For some time now I have been concerned with Jemimah's spelling. It is, to be perfectly honest, atroshus. Reely, reely terrabul even. Now this shouldn't surprise me unduly. I shouldn't even be worried, because unlike our local public school, where kids bring home their first list of spelling words within the first week of Grade Prep, Jemimah has never had a lesson in spelling in her life. She reads beautifully, she has been taught a few phonics rules - just a few, and that is it. The problem is that it shows. She can't spell.
Now I was a natural speller. I was always good at it. The idea that my clever daughter might not be horrifies me.
This kid can't spell basic words - like what and ball and when. Really common words. Words she has seen over and over and over. "Shut your eyes! Picture what the word looks like! Now can you spell it?" I ask her, almost pleading. But no. She can't. I could. Clearly Miss Mason thought this was the idea as well.
So now I have decided to do something about it. I am going to teach her to spell. And I am going to do it now - in the third term of AO3. Which is when, as her teacher, I have judged that she needs it and not in AO4 or AO5 when she is ten.
Which is why the AO Police will be arresting me any day now and taking me away for re-education with the peasants in Siberia.
Now when I think rationally I believe that if I introduced spelling at the stage AO recommends, it would work, but when I noticed that children of 8 and 9 were using dictation as an aid to spelling in Charlotte Mason's classrooms I decided that it was only logical to introduce it in my classroom as well. Especially since my student was aware of her poor spelling and was highly motivated to do something about it.
Dictation lessons, conducted in some such way as the following, usually result in good spelling. A child of eight or nine prepares a paragraph, older children a page, or two or three pages. The child prepares by himself, by looking at the word he is not sure of, and then seeing it with his eyes shut. Before he begins, the teacher asks what words he thinks will need his attention. He generally knows, but the teacher may point out any word likely to be a cause of stumbling. He lets his teacher know when he is ready. The teacher asks if there are any words he is not sure of. These she puts, one by one, on the blackboard, letting the child look till he has a picture, and then rubbing the word out. If anyone is still doubtful he should be called to put the word he is not sure of on the board, the teacher watching to rub out the word when a wrong letter begins to appear, and again helping the child to get a mental picture. Then the teacher gives out the dictation, clause by clause, each clause repeated once. She dictates with a view to the pointing, which the children are expected to put in as they write; but they must not be told 'comma,' 'semicolon,' etc. After the sort of preparation I have described, which takes ten minutes or less, there is rarely an error in spelling. If there be, it is well worth while for the teacher to be on the watch with slips of stamp-paper to put over the wrong word, that its image may be erased as far as possible. At the end of the lesson, the child should again study the wrong word in his book until he says he is sure of it, and should write it correctly....
Charlotte Mason Home Education pp241-2
At least when the Ambleside Online Coppers come a calling they will comforted to know that I am teaching spelling the CM way - through visualisation; that power of the eye to take a detailed picture of a word. Miss Mason was of the opinion that this was the key to good spelling.
With this as our premise, she then goes on to caution us about the danger inherent in a child being allowed to see incorrect spelling:
An error once made and corrected leads to fearful doubt for the rest of one's life, as to which was the wrong way and which is the right. Most of us are haunted by some doubt as to whether 'balance,' for instance, should have one 'l' or two; and the doubt is born of a correction. Once the eye sees a misspelt word, that image remains; and if there is also the image of the word rightly spelt, we are perplexed as to which is which.
Charlotte Mason Home Education p 241
She's right, isn't she? Lose or Loose; Chose or Choose? We all have words that trip us up because we have seen them being spelled incorrectly as often as we have seen them error free.
Fortunately, Miss Mason then goes on to explain to us a method that 'usually results in good spelling'. It is called Studied Dictation, and in the quote above she explains exactly how to go about it. Notice that there are no spelling lists. Words are learned in context along with the accompanying grammar and punctuation. The words are meaningful. The passage is from a living book - generally one of the child's literature texts. The child understands what is being said.
The only problem that I could see with Miss Mason's method was that it required prior preparation by her teacher...and that meant me. Now I am reluctant to commit to much that requires work by me out of school hours. Those hours are family time. It is my practice to prepare thoroughly at the beginning of the year; to revise at the beginning of each term and then to do very little more. I was a little reluctant to commit to this process of selecting passages that fit all of Miss Mason's criteria, but which also covered all of the basic spelling words - regular and irregular that my child would need to learn during her time at school.
Then along came Sonya. Hip Hip Hooray!
I'll leave Sonya to have a chat to you about how to do Charlotte Mason Studied Dictation the easy way. It's called Spelling Wisdom, and it's published by Sonya Shafer through Simply Charlotte Mason. Have a listen to her now:
To me, Spelling Wisdom is CM dictation the easy way. Today's 6000 most frequently used words are presented in the words or great writers, and many are from books or authors Jemimah has studied: Robert Louis Stephenson's poems; The Bible; Shakespeare; Hans Christian Anderson; Robinson Crusoe; Sherlock Holmes; Wind in the Willows; and more. Many of them, in fact, are the very same passages I would select myself if I were preparing dictation from scratch.
Even better, the programme comes in both British/Australian and American English. Spiffing!
We've only been using the method now for a few weeks, but already Jemimah's spelling has improved immeasurably. The spelling of ought leads to bought, sought, thought, fought and wrought. First begats thirst. Preach leads to teach, peach, and reach. More importantly, her confidence has improved. She is no longer embarrassed by the fact that her six year old cousins spell better than she does. She is coming ahead in leaps and bounds, and she knows it.
Jemimah is still a pretty lousy speller, and will be for some time to come, but I now have confidence that she will be able to spell reasonably eventually, and that allows this natural speller to breathe a sigh of relief.
When I tell all that to the Ambleside Online Policeman, do you think he'll let me off? Siberia gets pretty cold in winter I'm told.
Given her struggles with spelling, word play games on the English language are not Jemimah's idea of a fun way of whiling away a pleasant Sunday afternoon. Her daddy and I, on the other hand, gain a great deal of pleasure in playing with, and discussing, words and language. The amusing quirks, absurdities and oddities of our own English language and its pronunciation and spelling will never cease to amuse us. Yes, yes, I know: small minds, and all that.
