Posts
woo hoo!
Megawords: personal history
Being your child's frontal lobes May 5, 2005
Megawords 1 completed May 14, 2005
Bonus pre-teen post June 6, 2005
How to spell, inquiry version June 14, 2005
How to spell, inquiry version pt 2 June 14, 2005
Spell check March 4, 2006
Bad spelling on job applications March 4, 2006
Sea sponge-worthy March 7, 2006
Megawords in the summer June 11, 2005
Spelling Inquiry June 14, 2005
Sounding out nonsense words January 31, 2006
In which I attempt to purchase a Top Secret spelling program March 3, 2006
Megawords 2 in progress March 7, 2006
Megawords, Moats, schwa sound, ABCs & All Their Tricks
Megawords: Saxon Math of spelling June 14, 2005
"second stage phonics" & 4th grade slump June 14, 2005
Liveblogging the spelling bee June 2, 2005
Megawords 3 completed June 25, 2006
Summer school 2007: Megawords 4 July 14, 2007
Put the politician in a submission hold August 5, 2007
Why not a spelling war? September 12, 2007
Spelling & reading September 16, 2007
Megawords 4 completed October 3, 2007
Syllables, Syllables, Syllabary (Elizabeth) February 11, 2007
The ABC's and All Their Tricks by M. Bishop
10 comments:
Here's another resource: Michael Clay Thompson's Word Within a Word
". . . a program that heavily uses etymology, not memorization. Words are presented as a system of thinking, a way of building, analyzing, spelling, pronouncing, using and choosing words. The beauty of this approach is that students will know far more than the list of words encountered in this course, the tens of thousands of words which are not listed, but which are expressions of the system."
I have these books, and they look so fascinating, but I've just never gotten determined enough in my homeschooling/afterschooling efforts to dig into them.
Michael Clay Thompson also wrote the Magic Lens grammar series:
"From a utilitarian point of view, I think Grammar is an intellectual pocket-knife; it is small, easily purchased, and so useful that one would not dream of being without it.
"Grammar is so lovely that even if it were useless, one would irresistibly explore it, as one explores chess, or architecture, or the spiral geometries of shells. It is a sort of magic aesthetic lens, through which we can view the delicate structures of ideas." - Michael Clay Thompson
Congrats! It sounds like you and C are working hard this summer.
Clicking through some of the links made me think about what an amazing legacy has already been created by KTM.
Felicidades! What a journey. Go Big C!
Congratulations!
I'm tutoring a 6th grader with Webster's Speller, it's going well. He's amazed that he can read words correctly that he doesn't know, he remarked about that several times. I told him that everyone should be able to read almost any word they don't know, with the exception of a few French words, and that everyone would be able to do this if everyone was taught with Webster's Speller.
I learned a new rule about y at the end of words--if a syllable at the end of a word is unaccented, y has its long e sound. If the syllable is accented, it has its long I sound. I've been tutoring for 14 years and I still learn new things occasionally! (I didn't bother with the rules when teaching my daughter, they didn't seem to register with her. They work well for my remedial students, however. Beginning students seem to pick on on things by learning their pattern for the most part.)
I'm becoming a bigger fan of Webster's Speller every day! Interestingly, it teaches "easy" words like in-fan-cy and ped-ant-ry and e-pit-o-me before "difficult and irregular monosyllables" like bay and rail and tea and hear and gleam! (e-pit-o-me, for example, is in a table of "easy words of four syllables, accented on the second.")
Today's phonics programs have the order reversed, for the most part, if they even get to syllable division at all, which most of them don't.
He's amazed that he can read words correctly that he doesn't know, he remarked about that several times.
Yes!
Yes!
Yes!
That's what made such a large impression on me -- the fact that C. could not read words he didn't already know.
He still has some trouble with that -- he encountered the word "dispensary" in ANGELA'S ASHES & couldn't pronounce it later. (Of course that was from memory.)
His spelling is radically improved.
That was a funny moment this spring. He showed me a paper he'd written (I mentioned this already) that had NO paragraphs AT ALL.
But the spelling was perfect.
Thanks, you guys!
For everything!
Thompson's book looks great---!
We're not working hard at all!
It's great!
Having a serious summer assignment from the school makes life SO much easier.
I've got to get serious about math review this summer, though. I decided just to print out the JMAP mixed review workbook (I'll get the link posted).
C had been resisting me on it, but he's starting to get serious, too. It looks like there's a significant population of Indian students at the school, and we both figure they're going to be in C's math class.
Speaking of Indian students, it's time to watch 2 Million Minutes.
Speaking of Indian students, it's time to watch 2 Million Minutes.
Absolutely. I predict this to be a motivater, for sure.
My high school had a very high percentage of Japanese, Koreans, Chinese and Indians. No beating around the bush about it -- they truly raise the bar. I may not have been pushed to work as diligently as I did had it not been for classmates such as these.
No wonder you're so brainy!
One of the fun findings in Steinberg's study was that Asian kids do better than they should -- that is, they do better than you would predict based in their parents' SES & in their parents parenting style.
iirc, the explanation was that Asian kids tend to have Asian peers.
The horrible thing was that black students, in the aggregate, do worse than you would predict based on their parents' SES & parenting style.
So we've got pundits constantly blaming black families for not valuing school, not "supporting" their kids' homework, etc., etc., etc....and when someone does a real analysis you find out it's a whole different story.
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