So, I’ve “officially” been a “teacher” for almost 2 years now. It’s mostly been great, but it does constantly keep you on your toes. It makes you wonder if you’re doing things right, how you could do things better, why on EARTH you decided to put your kids’ education in YOUR hands, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so it’s a weeee bit stressful too! I think part of that has to do with me trying to be a perfectionist (okay, not with everything, but with things I’m really interested in).

Anyway, to get to my point, I talk to people. A lot. I ask questions. Particularly when it’s about homeschooling or photography. Or anything I need to know really. Well, recently I talked to a very smart friend of mine who is a public school teacher, and let me tell you, if my kids were still in public school, I would want the in HER class! She gets the kids who don’t get to do school at home, because their parents don’t help them. Some of them are in jail. Others are drug addicts. Others are simply single parents, working and just don’t have the time. She knows that for them to succeed in life (or at least in her class), she has to get through to them in the classroom. If she hasn’t heard it come out of their mouths, she considers it not yet learned. So she teaches them. She has them practice the correct way. Once they have practiced correctly, she does a project of some sort to reinforce what they have learned and practiced. She gave me one example of how she does this.

I was telling her about my 2nd grader who was struggling with reading this year. I knew my daughter was having trouble since kindergarten (which she did in public school), but to be honest, I didn’t know how to fix it & I was busy with young twins at the time. Then in 1st grade, she came home for her first year of homeschooling. We had a fabulous grammar book, and we were doing reading for fluency, but I guess it just wasn’t quite enough. Regardless of the reason, at the beginning of 2nd grade, I knew she wasn’t where she should be when she took the WASC test, looked at a full page of print and just cried. She couldn’t even complete the test. After many tears and wondering about the many ways in which I must have failed her, and after talking to my teacher friends, one of them heard me out and assured me that she just needed help with her fluency. So we got to work. Eventually, I even took her to 12 weeks of tutoring just to have another face in the mix. She has made a lot of progress, only for me to realize that we’ve fallen behind on her writing! ACK. Once again, this takes us back to kindergarten and the way they were doing things (don’t get me wrong, we ADORED her kindergarten teacher, but sometimes they are told how they should be teaching something.). They taught them a lot of “sound-out spelling,” which I thought was really cute (because if you’ve seen a kindergartener spell, it’s pretty funny!), but there was a small part of me that wondered how this was helping them, because so many words in our language are not phonetic. SO many words break the rules! There are a ton of grammar rules, and then a lot of words don’t fall into those rules, so it must be very frustrating to learn how to read the English language!

Back to my friend. She told me that if she was teaching kindergarten, she would not have them do sound-out spelling. Instead, she would have them copy sentences from the chalkboard onto their papers, with correct grammar, punctuation & spelling. THIS, along with sight words, reading aloud and other methods, is a superior way (in her opinion) to teach spelling, writing and reading. And honestly, it was like a breath of fresh air. She gave me a fantastic idea. Some of you may not agree with it, but it seemed like such a relief to me, because it made sense to me. (Side note: Whenever my kids used sound-out spelling, I would always tell them, “That’s great sound-out spelling. Would you like to see the proper way to spell that word now?” I could never just let it be, because I didn’t see how it would help them to learn and practice it incorrectly!) Anyway, she said to tell them about when books are made, they go to a publisher. They make lots of copies to sell in the stores. She said to take a book and have your child play publisher. They get to copy the book, word-for-word, with all the correct punctuation, on those children’s writing sheets (you know, those ones with the lines that have the dashed line in the middle and then the space for pictures above). Then they get to draw a picture for each page. She said if it were her class, she would tell them the book has to be “perfect” and that if it was, she would “pay” them (she happens to have a student store…she pays them in tickets and once they earn enough money, they have special days when you can shop in the student store) for their book. I LOVE this idea. We started today. Emma has become a publisher. I’m going to give it a try. I don’t know for sure if this is the right way. But it just makes sense to me that if they are put in front of correct grammar, correct spelling and a fun way to do it, often enough, that this will help more than guessing or “sound-out spelling” any day!

I’m so thankful for the particular people the Lord has placed in my life. I’m thankful that he gave me a big mouth, so that I’ll ask questions. I’m thankful that he gave me some really smart people in my life…to whom I can ask all of life’s tough questions! lol…

Hope this helps. If not, blame my friend! haha…just kidding!!!!