I’m going to say this in a whisper…I think my daughter is learning to spell! I don’t want to say it too loud or jinx it. Spelling has been such a struggle for my daughter. She is in 6th grade and has avoided writing anything except when I force her to write. She claims she doesn’t like to write because she can’t spell, and seeing the words misspelled but not knowing how to make them correct makes her insane.

We have tried all kinds of things to help her with learning spelling. We have used word books, word ladders, cross word puzzles, and all kinds of games, both online and in workbooks.

We have even used a flash card maker online to keep her from having to write the words physically, because she is very resistant to write anything.

This week she has started writing a book. She uses a word processing program and uses spell check, but we are having a lot less total melt downs because she can’t spell a word. I do see improvement in her spelling, and I am overjoyed that some of the things we have been doing to improve her spelling seem to be working. I’m very proud of her decision to write a book, because it marks another step in her language arts proficiency. Can I also add that writing is what I do and to have her decide to write means that she sees value in the work she sees me do? It has been a good week!

Vocabulary, the bigger the better! Ok, that might be an exaggeration, but then again…maybe not!

I learned how important having a great vocabulary was by watching and listening to my father. He was not a native English speaker so there were times when he simply did not have the English word he was looking for. Crossword puzzles were particularly difficult for him, yet he did them on a regular basis. I remember that he kept a pocket dictionary with him at all times, so that he could spell or look up words. Don’t get me wrong, he spoke great English, even got through a Master’s degree, but I remember him working to improve his vocabulary all the time, whether it was reading, crossword puzzles, or other vocabulary games.

Because it was so important to him, it became important to me, though I didn’t realize that until much later. Just like we should let our kids see us spend time with good books, reading because it is enjoyable and important, we should make learning vocabulary important, too.

I think I have succeeded in that with my own daughter because she has a great spoken vocabulary. I don’t take the credit for that; all I did was expose her to words, to books, to audio books. I gave her games for matching vocabulary to definitions, and talked to her from long before she was born. I don’t force her learn, I just expose her to words every chance I get.

I praise her when she takes a written word she read in a book, or studied in a lesson, and uses it in context in a conversation. And this is an ongoing process, I figure as long as I am exposing her to a larger vocabulary, I should take advantage of the learning also. After all, can you really have too big of a vocabulary?!

My daughter is a reluctant writer. That is not anything new. I really don’t know if she will willingly write a lot. She has a great spoken vocabulary, and she can read anything I put in front of her. But she doesn’t spell well. She knows that she doesn’t spell well. She can recognize that the word is spelled wrong, just doesn’t know how to fix that. It is very frustrating for her, and this continues to be disheartening to her.

We do a lot of extra word work. We do word ladders, and find a word, and crossword puzzles. I let her write words on a white board and decorate with artwork to her heart’s content if she gets the words spelled correctly. We have even done some compound word games. Truthfully, the games are the best received by my daughter.

I will continue to work with her. We allow assistive devices for writing. She is able to use the computer, and we have activated the voice recognition software. All we can do is keep working, because she wants to go to veterinarian school eventually. To get into veterinary school she needs to get into college, and to do that the SAT stands between her and admission. Doing well on the SAT writing portion of that test is my ultimate goal for her, but between now and then, I just want her to get a little more confidence and enjoyment in her writing.

Were you homeschooling before homeschooling was cool? I’ve been homeschooling for a little over five years now, and even in just that short amount of time I have noticed that homeschooling has become much more acceptable.

Unlike many of my homeschooling friends, I found the right curriculum for us right off the bat. We didn’t try a lot of different curricula, nor did we jump on the bandwagon of the latest homeschooling trends. I feel fortunate that we didn’t waste a lot of time or money getting the curriculum right. I have friends who change curriculum for each child two or three times a year with the resulting hit on the pocketbook.

One of the reasons I believe that happens is that some of them believe that if you throw money at it, their child will learn. I don’t know about you, but throwing several hundred dollars at a curriculum only to have it not work, necessitating yet another curriculum expenditure is just not in the cards (or the wallet, for that matter!) for us.
That is part of the reason that I am here to shamelessly plug a great site for homeschooling families. HomeschoolLiterature.com is a web site that specializes in literature for, by, and about homeschoolers. They have started a great Book Club that I wanted you to know about.

Each book in the HomeschoolLiterature.com Book Club is studied using a mixture of worksheets, hands-on activities, and online games. Activities are available for both older and younger student groups. All books included in the Book Club can be easily obtained either at your local library, local book stores, or via online retailers such as Amazon.com.

Best of all, participation in the HomeschoolLiterature.com Book Club is ABSOLUTELY FREE!! Simply go to Homeschool Literature to register, and you can access all of the Book Club materials immediately! While you are there, check out our large and growing list of book reviews for homeschoolers.

A homeschooling friend of mine recently announced that her son would be beginning to learn Latin next year. I was puzzled; after all he would only be in second grade at that time. She reminded me that it would help him when he got to med school. Again, huh? He will be a second grader!
I argued that he needed to learn English first; her counter was that English contained a lot of words that had Latin root words. She is one of those people you can’t win an argument with even if you argued that she had to breath to talk, so I just said that was great, but not for my child.
Just the next week my daughter had a spelling unit that was based on words with Latin and Greek origins. Maybe I was a little wrong, after all, I had translated a Latin phrase without looking it up because I spoke enough Spanish to recognize the similarities between the Latin and Spanish, which is a romance language with Latin roots.
I’m still not sure that I think the study of Latin is necessary as a language by itself, but maybe I can see where becoming familiar with some of the more common root words might not hurt either my daughter’s study of English, or Spanish for that matter. So, in addition to studying English, Spanish, spelling units that emphasis the Latin root words, I think I might add a couple of those Latin learning games I ran across the other day.
That should cover my linguistic bases, right?! I sure hope so, because I don’t really want to learn Latin so that I can teach it my daughter. Who else would I speak it with (after all, it is a dead language)? Oh, yeah, my friend’s second grader!
How do you feel about your children learning Latin?