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These Kids Today...

Tom Tit's Tot: A Girl!

11:25 / 26.01.05

I work with approximately thirty children aged five to eleven on a daily basis, and despite the concerns of their elders and various people on these boards, think that MOST of them are perfectly well-adjusted. Corcerned about a few (particularly a ten-year-old girl that is almost certainly anorexic... that breaks my heart...) but in thinking about their education as a whole, I'm concerned about their spelling. Fairly inconsequential thing compared with other problems I've observed, but I've always been a bit anal about spelling and misuse of words, likely because I am guilty of it on occasion and can't stand seeing my flaws in other people.

However.

Most of the children I work with, when asked to spell, say, cat, will spell it "Kuh-Ah-Tuh" phonetically, I gather. I was never taught to spell phonetically, because I learned that letters have names (See) and some have different pronunciations (Suh, Kuh) (I'm bad at phonetic spelling, hope you get the idea) But I'm concerned that children learning to spell phonetically will have problems with certain letters as they grow up. Besides, "Kuh-Ah-Tuh", aside from sounding like an Elder God invocation, could spell cat as "Kat" or "Cat".... but do they know that?

ANyone have similar experiences or thoughts?

We're The Great Old Ones Now

12:19 / 26.01.05

Isn't it rather rare for a pre-adolescent to be anorexic? Or am I being sadly naive? I thought the syndrome was most often found after the onset of puberty.

Spelling and grammar - bad words in today's world, but I was always thankful for the instruction in them I had when I was a kid. Some languages - German, for example - depend on marking out relative clauses and so on to make sense. Similarly, many or most other languages are inflected, and therefore a working knowledge of cases is handy - although I suppose you could assert that all language should be learned piecemeal, networked and idiomatic rather than didactic and structured. I was taught both letter names and phonetic spelling as a kid, for whatever it's worth.

I think probably different answers will work better with individual kids, and no one will suffer from having alternative ways of looking at stuff.

Tryphena Absent

12:30 / 26.01.05

I thought the syndrome was most often found after the onset of puberty.

Some girls hit puberty at 9 years old.

Are you English? I ask because I'm guessing that despite the phonetic teaching (I was taught to spell phonetically and it works if you read. I've always been good at spelling) most of these children are probably basing the word cat on the chocolate bar. It's the spelling of Kat that they come across most regularly.

12:44 / 26.01.05

I always had the opposite concern: that kids were not learning phonetically. There's a huge debate about all this, but my common sense (note the my) says that learning to spell cat as "see-ai-tee" is going to help less that "cuh-ah-tuh". Even if you're trying to wierd words like plough, you're likely to get closer to the sound of the word. Whadda I know, though?

13:13 / 26.01.05

im having trouble even comprehending the possible benefit to "learning" how to spell anything phonetically. if you already can pronounce the word properly, but you are not learning how to form it graphically with existing letters, what are you learning? if this just a kind of game to pre-learn how to learn later in life, when you're ready for the alphabet? and if so, why would a 10 year old need to do this?

Tryphena Absent

13:22 / 26.01.05

But there are words that I just can't spell in images. Separate- I only remembered how to spell it when I started pronouncing the first a in my head. If you play a permanent word game with the spellings you find difficult you're far more likely to remember them... (Two Ton Car Men- Tutankhamen.) The point is that we don't pronounce a lot of words as they're spelt and if we can match the pronounciation with the letters than we recall them as we otherwise wouldn't.

It's the same logic that makes the alphabet in to a song. It's a memory game and for a lot of people who find the type of recollection that you're suggesting difficult a game is the best way to address that difficulty.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

17:54 / 26.01.05

(OT: Nick, you're being sadly naive, I'm afraid. Youngsters in the West are increasingly affected by anorexia, even kids as young as four.)

wembley can change in 28 days

18:04 / 26.01.05

Well, before I went to school, my mom was all about phonics (the irony just hit me, by the way, that it's not fonics). She would sit me down and have me read with her, spelling out the words in that elder-incantation-spells-with-toads way "duh oh guh", and i a) learned to read well before school and b) to this day have a tendency to win spelling bees. This could have nothing to do with the phonics, but they sure didn't mess up my chances at landing a stupid job writing cell phone marketing texts.

19:20 / 26.01.05

Yeah, that's kind of my reasoning, too. I could read well before I went to scholl and that's the way my mum taught me. I used to be able to separate the ay bee cee that I heard on Sesame Street from the ah buh cuh that schools programmes taught quite early, and it always worried the heck out of me when I noticed that (when I was older) for a while kids seemed to have no conception that there was a difference between the name of the letter and its sound. That would be the period when foniks wus out of vogew.

trouser the trouserian

20:12 / 26.01.05

I learnt ITA at school but can't recall anything about it now - any old codgers know what that was all about?

20:34 / 26.01.05

I've only been involved with this sort of thing twice, when I was learning to read and when my sister was. In both cases, we more or less taught ourselves, with a little bit of assistance from our elders, because we wanted to--because reading was a mysterious power grown-ups had. We used both methods more or less interchangeably, as the situation required.

20:58 / 26.01.05

Three years ago my son, Harry and I went through learning phonetically when he first started school and we came across the learning system Jollyphonics. This teaches the children 36 phonetic sounds, and each sound has a picture and an action. This means the children have a visual clue to the letter-sound, a clue they can hear (what is that word for that?) and a physical clue. It's fantastic. All the children could read by the end of the first term.

Now Harry is ace at reading and writing (which in some ways is unsuprising since both his Gran and I read almost constantly) but he's seven in about 5 and a half hours and reads like a ten year old.

At his school the children are encouraged to spell any new word phonetically if they don't know how to actually spell it, just so they can keep a flow in their writing. Then they go back over and amend the wrongly spelled words. I think this is a clever idea, and it makes amusing afternoons for me. He brought home a poem about Autumn which contained the line - All the creches are going to sleep. "Creches?" I thought. "Creches?" So I asked him what it said and he looked at me like I had major brain trauma and said, "Creatures."

This is true.

There are always ways to get children interested in reading, spelling and words. In our house we have word of the day, which is something I have always done and which Harry has joined in with gusto. Word of the day is awarded to anyone who uses a really good word in ordinary everyday conversation and Harry has become obsessed with winning it. He frequently inserts random unconnected but fairly impressive words into the conversation in the hope that he might chance on a right one.

23:43 / 26.01.05

I began learning to read before school-age through memorization. My parents would read me something (a book, a sign) over and over while I read along, and over time I linked the visual words with what I heard. Of course, I couldn't read whole books before getting to kindergarten, but I could, for instance, "read" a stop sign.

Once in school, I learned to spell phonetically. For people wondering what the hell that even means, in kindergarten we slowly learned the alphabet and the sound each letter makes. So once you know that C makes "kuh," A makes "ah" or "ay," and T makes "tuh," you can start spelling simple words. It's a writing (constructive) method of learning to spell, rather than a reading (or analytical) method.

From what I understand, the grade school I went to kept changing its mind, over the years, on whether to teach spelling/reading phonetically or otherwise. They switched back and forth a few times. I have several siblings, and according to my mother, my brothers had a much more difficult time learning the non-phonetic way, but that's hardly conclusive - maybe I was just a naturally better speller (I'm certainly much more of a reader than either of them).

01:27 / 27.01.05

My children both went to primary school in the UK; they both learned to spell phonetically, and both have MUCH higher than average reading skills---the younger won every spelling bee she ever entered, both read like maniacs today. AND, to top it off, both were in foster care for two years, which experience would alone have predicted against any of this.

So I, for one, don't think phonetics is anything to be concerned about. In fact, I think it did help them. (And, by the way, they called the letter "K" a "kicking kuh," to differentiate it from a normal "kuh"--I suspect your pupils are doing the same). They both really "got" it. They DID learn the traditional names for the alphabet--on sesame street, from their elders, etc.--but they also learned this method. Despite much trauma in their lives, they are brilliant. Isn't that a great story?

09:00 / 29.01.05

I learned how to spell phonetically, and I turned out OK. Like alas' children I was a spelling-bee rock star as a young'un and if you can believe it I actually teach English now!

If you think about it, it's a good way to learn to spell because English isn't actually a phonetic language. That said, there are patterns to English spelling and essentially phonetic work teaches learners to notice those patterns. So in the long run it's a good thing.

I'd just correct them when they make those spelling mistakes, doesn't sound like a problem to worry about.

Additionally, being a good or bad speller has absolutely no bearing on how intelligent one is. This fact, needless to say,was a crushing blow to my ego.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

09:53 / 29.01.05

Would it be impudent of me to point out some of the shocking grammar and spelling in this thread?

Cause for corcern indeed.

11:50 / 29.01.05

They were typos, I tell you!