Our Simple Life

Cursive writing and spelling

M has been doing some casual learning of cursive writing for several months now. Her name looks great and tracing individual words is easy for her. I have yet to have her practice writing things in cursive without tracing but I think she's almost ready.

I asked her tonight at dinner how she felt she was doing with it and she fist, LOL, said "Why? Why are you asking that?" ;) And I said that I was just wondering, just curious. She said she felt o.k. but that she wasn't very good at it. Instead of agreeing or disagreeing, I asked her what she thought might help her do better. She said that each day for school she should practice tracing the whole alphabet, first lower then upper case. I asked her if she wanted the arrows on it and she said that, yes, that that would probably help.

M will be 8 in April so she would be in second grade if she went to school. Well, from when she first began writing at age 5, I never pushed the spelling thing. If she wanted to know how to spell a word I would tell her or write it down for her to copy. She is somewhat of a perfectionist so if she wanted to know how to spell the word, she wanted to know! not "guess" or "think" she might be spelling a word right. Inventive spelling would've been torture for her.

When she was 6 I bought her a personal dictionary that has many words for each letter as well as lines you can write more words on. She enjoyed this a lot and it quickly taught her to alphabetize as well. Over the course of a year she had begun needing it less and less, epsecially with high frequency words. Also, her confidence grew on her ability to sound words out.

Starting this past August (when she would've entered second grade) I started a spelling notebook with her. I gave her ten spelling words a week and an activity for each day (M-F) to review them. The activities I found online were: Use the words in sentences; Alphabetize the ten words; Draw a picture for each word; Rainbow words (write each word in a different color using marker or colored pencil; Write words in cursive; Type words on computer using different fonts and sizes & then print; Write each word and then write a word next to it that ryhmes. She did very well with memorizing the words and she didn't complain too much about the activities because I'd let her choose which one she wanted to do each day.

A month or two ago I was browsing spelling lists online and I saw more second grade words that I had yet to teach/test her on. But, as I was looking I wondered if she didn't already know all those words. M was sitting on the couch in the same room as me at the time so I handed her a piece of paper and a pencil and told her I wanted to see how many of the following words she could spell-no pressure, I was just curious. Well, do you know she got all the 15 words right? It boosted her confidence so much that I decided to start doing that more often. Now, every time I "quiz" her she usually gets all of them right (there've been a few times she's missed one).

One thing that has helped her tremendously is her ability to read so well. She reads between fourth and fifth grade level (of course, fiction at that level is almost always inappropriate for her, maturity wise, so she sticks mainly to long non fiction books). Because of her strength in reading, she knows what words look like. If she writes a word and it is spelled incorrectly, she sees it immediately. She may not always know the correct spelling, but she does know when it's wrong!

I think I'll move on to third grade lists soon and start the ten words a week again. It was very effective in teaching her new words. :)