Apr. 28, 2007 - Can I Have a Quill Pen With That? Using Noah Webster’s Speller in Today’s Home School.
Generations of American children successfully learned to read and spell using Noah Webster’s “Blue-Backed” speller. For centuries before that, children successfully learned to read and spell using the syllable method. Like classical education, Webster’s Speller remains a great way to teach a child. Don Potter has recently finished a user friendly version of Webster's 1824 Speller with accented syllables in bold.
Webster’s Speller teaches phonics using the syllable method. Syllables that end in a consonant have a short vowel sound: ab, eb, ib, ob, ub. Syllables that end in a vowel have a long vowel sound: ba, be, bi, bo, bu, by. Students should be able to sound out and spell all the syllables in the syllabary (Lessons 1 -12, page 15 – 16) on their own before they move on to learning words. Have them spell using magnetic letters if they are not yet old enough to write well.
Developed for use in one-room schoolhouses, Webster’s Speller is an excellent choice for today’s homeschooler. Young students can study the syllabary while their older siblings work on the word lists for spelling and reading practice and on the reading selections for reading practice and moral guidance.
As Geraldine Rodgers says in her paper, Why Noah Webster Was Right ,
"Noah Webster was right. The first thing to teach little children is how to spell orally and then how to read, by their letter “sound,” long lists of multisyllabic words in English. “Meaning” should have nothing whatsoever to do with the initial stages of literacy. However, once the children's decoding has become automatic, they have become independent readers and are then ready for reading “meaningful” texts. As was true for little Webster-taught children before 1826, children can then pick up the Psalms in the Bible and read them fluently - or can read anything else, for that matter."
Don Potter spent many hours making Noah Webster’s syllable method available for easy use in digital format for those of us in the 21st Century and would be interested to hear of your progress with this method. You can test your child’s reading grade level up to 6th grade here at Don Potter’s Web page, and for grades 8 – 12 here at my phonics web page. You can also chart their progress with the MWIA, a test to determine the degree of “whole word dyslexia.” A student trained with a good phonics program and with no sight words (read more about how to teach “sight words” phonetically here) should have no whole word dyslexia at all. You can post your experiences and questions about using Webster's Speller in the comments here.
I plan to use both Webster’s Speller and A Beka for our 5 year old this coming school year. And yes, you can mix phonics programs! As long as you use good phonics programs that teach in an explicit, systematic manner with a minimum of sight words (or better yet, avoid sight words altogether), teaching a variety of phonics programs will merely deepen your student’s understanding of the sound spelling patterns of English, improving their reading and spelling abilities. Although the font size in Don Potter’s update of Webster’s Speller is quite an improvement from the original, it is still a bit small for a 5 year old. We will use our modern day slate, a magnadoodle, for practice with the syllabary and the words in Webster. I will write about our experiences with Webster's method here.
And yes, if you wish, you can get a quill pen with this. Colonial Williamsburg has quill pens available for a reasonable price online.
Comments
May. 1, 2007 - Untitled Comment
Posted by Redbud
I really like the Magnadoodle cum slate idea, as long as it has a stylus, of course. This is approach is well thought-out. I especially like the avoidance of sight words. Over my years of home schooling (17), I have come to the opinion they pretty much do nothing but help muddle things.
Sherry
May. 1, 2007 - Untitled Comment
Posted by PhonicsMom
Ah, a fellow mac user!
We love our magnadoodle.
Of course, I can't see doing complex integrals or even long division on one, so we may have to stop using it eventually, but it's perfect for simple phonics explanations.
I have tutored many children and a few adults who have been much more than muddled from too many sight words. The more sight words, the worse the problem and the more remediation needed.