Learning in the Absence of Education
Essays on Homeschooling
© Beverley Paine
Index
Homeschool
Australia
Thoughts on Spelling
(continued)
A lot of the concern expressed about children learning in schools, or not learning certain things at certain ages, tend to disappear in the home environment. The elaborate educational strategies to teach these things are usually unnecessary in the home. Long hours of specific lessons in many subject areas, like spelling, are reduced to 'on the spot' attention when the child is writing. In many cases a child will learn so much faster, only needing to be shown once or twice, at the right time, whatever is needed. Picking the right time is the key to this kind of learning success, and comes with intimately knowing your child's learning needs, something most teachers couldn't come close to.
Long before I read any teacher manuals or texts on the subject of spelling I used my own brain to think about the whole spelling debate. The use of invented spelling just makes sense - it is an exercise in problem solving. Children are excellent inventors and lateral thinkers until we stuff it up with our 'correct' ways of doing things. Just think of invented spelling as the children approximating, an excellent skill in itself to promote in young learners.
If we look at babies learning to eat for the first time, we see them picking up the spoon in many inefficient ways and stuffing food not only in their mouths but on their cheeks, on their chins, their bibs, just about anywhere! Sure, we often guide the spoon, and turn it over, and scrape the excess off, but mostly we give up and let them get on with the business of feeding themselves. Only when we needed to impress important guests, did we feed our children in a tidy and pleasing manner, or insist on a display of 'manners'.
Learning to spell is a bit like that. We let them get on with the business of writing when they need to write, but when something is written for an audience other than for themselves a special show is put on to make it look tidy and presentable, conventional. Here we help our children to do this, and eventually they can do it all by themselves. No one has to continue to spoon feed a child with a bib throughout childhood, do they?
We may not place an emphasis on correct spelling in the early years, but there is an overall expectation that children will conform as they grow and develop. It important to have and display this expectation. Children will live up to the expectations of others. They have an instinctive need to impress, especially important, people in their lives. I believe that expectation it is a huge part of the how and why our children learn. I have an expectation that my children will write at a satisfactory level by age eighteen. They know that and will live up to it, with my help, of course. It is a shared goal, a shared expectation. They know that it is important in our culture to know how to read, write and spell with reasonable proficiency by this age.
In many home educating families the opportunity to practice writing and therefore spelling rarely comes up, unless the child has a special interest or writing activities are specifically introduced. Generally we lead active, busy lives, doing so much more than simply reading and writing. These skills are an aid to many things in life, but are background skills, like social skills.
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Excerpt from Learning in the Absence of Home Education: Essays on Homeschooling
© Beverley Paine, 1999
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