| Doc, sounds like the "Won Way" system that my son used in kindergarten.
This is a system that encourages kids to write, whether or not they can
spell correctly or not, and encourages sounding out words, dipthongs,
etc. My son is a very verbal kid, so this may have helped him, but I
cannot say for anyone else.
Kate
|
| If what Kate described is one way, then Carrie had this type of
learning as well. I believe the theory is that kids will learn to
write the way they learn to speak, and correct spelling comes as they
increase their writing vocabulary. YMMV, and this doesn't seem to work
for my neighbor's child who has either a speech impediment or a
decoding problem, but Carrie did great with this. She was writing
quite incredible "essays" in the first grade, and I could manage to
make out everything she wrote. As the years have gone by, her spelling
has improved, and she has learned the rules when faced with an
unfamiliar word she wants to read or right.
meg
|
| >Doc, sounds like the "Won Way" system that my son used in kindergarten.
Yes, it is "Won Way" as I subsequently found out. Frankly, I don't
know what the big deal about this is. It seems pretty similar to what
she was doing at the public school, except in addition to learning to
spell words she has to code them as well. Coding is using a system of
numbers to describe the various vowel (and combination, etc) sounds. So
an a as used in cap is a 1, as used in cape is a 2, etc. There's also
some sort of underlining of letters (like th, etc) but I'm not really
sure what that's about. However it works, KC has caught right on and is
doing very well. When I had asked about this my daughter KC was going
into a private school (that we'd been trying like the dickens to get
her into) for a sort of audition/interview. This school is very
difficult to get into, as they only have 2 classes for each grade, and
KC had been on the waiting list for a long time. They told us that if
nobody left the class by thanksgiving we'd have to wait until next year
(at the earliest) because their policy is not to make changes to the
class after thanksgiving because the child would be too far behind the
rest of the class. Apparently my wife must have been enough of a pest,
because when they had a student drop out unexpectedly during Christmas
break they decided to see if KC could do the work. Fortunately we've
been working with her reading since 1st grade and she's reading at a
4th grade level, and that is very helpful. Her math skills need work,
but she's doing fine otherwise.
|