what if I can't spell and I'm hopeless at grammer!!!

[~*heket*~]

How do I facilitate learning in those areas? I could seriously fuck it all up correcting her spelling :rofl

I know I don't need to do actual structured lessons on the subject .... but I don't know where to go from there :shrug

(oh goddess, this is such a dumb question isn't it :bah)

[Beatrice]

Does she read for pleasure? Everything I know about grammar, I learned from reading :) I certainly don't remember anything I was actually taught!

[~*heket*~]

She doesn't read for pleasure, not stories anyway. She occasionally reads about frogs or bugs or bunnies etc, but no stories. She hates stories and I feel very sad about that actually. And the stuff she reads is often online so spelling ang grammer are optional from her sources iykwim :lol

[Janet]

You're an adult with spell check. So will she be one day. In the meantime, who cares if she can spell? Like Beatrice says, READING is where it's at and she loves sciencey stuff so she'll either spell or not. In any case, grown ups use spell check so it doesn't matter.

You have been a more than adequate parent, that won't stop. You just won't be cleaning up after the shit school heaps on her so life will be much easier.

[~*heket*~]

I feel an almost sad sense of relief that she already knows how to read (although I'm probably mostly responsible for that anyways :lol). Like the basics are already taken care of and I'll be able to just facilitate a greater depth of this stuff ... does that make sense?

Am very new to this whole idea, I didn't think she'd EVER take to it!

[Ilithyia]

You read my mind, heket :lol good thread :)

[~*heket*~]

and it's only 6 years overdue :blueroll

[Beatrice]

B's spelling is highly idiosyncratic, but it's improving heaps this year just because she's found things she's interested in doing which involve needing to write a lot. Mostly online, so she uses a spell checker and asks me for correct spelling of anything she can't figure out. She doesn't like dictionaries, but she knows where they are :)

It does seem to take her a very long time to impress the correct spelling into her memory (or possibly it just looks like a long time to me because I used to win spelling bees :lol), but I can see it happening gradually as she writes more. Her attempts are becoming more and more logically consistent as well. She cares about being legible, so she keeps asking me for help. Sooner or later she won't need to do that any more - I'm sure she won't still be ringing me when she's at uni :lol

[~*heket*~]

but I hope she is :lol

Thanx, that's reassuring.

[Beatrice]

Doh. Well I certainly hope she'll be ringing me for other things than help with her spelling :lol

[Ayla]

Heket, I'm constantly striving to improve my spelling and grammar and you know what did it? Every time I asked my mum how to spell something, or what a word meant, she would tell me to look it up in the dictionary. It drove me mental!! Why couldn't she just damn well answer me? :lol Eventually I began reading my novels with the dictionary right next to me so I could look up words straight away. Worked a charm :) Go forth and drive your daughter mental :lol

[Quickening]

I'm guilty of asking others what a word means because its quicker than looking for a dictionary. I should keep one on the table!

[Beatrice]

I'm not sure why asking is a problem? I see the "give them a dictionary and make them do it themselves" thing as being on the same continuum as "they have to learn to sleep by themselves" and "we need to make them become independent", TBH. If I told B she had to use a dictionary instead of asking me, she wouldn't use the dictionary, she'd just stop doing whatever it was which she needed help with. She's not asking me to be a pain or to be lazy, she asking because it's the least frustrating way for her to pursue her intent (of communicating with others). For me to treat it as an opportunity to impose the end goal of "independence" (something she will attain in her own time and her own way) on her rather than encouraging/facilitating her in pursuing the process of communicating and learning is totally inconsistent with my parenting philosophy.

[Ayla]

I see what you're saying, B, but I think it's what was part of my upbringing that taught me to find things out for myself instead of being spoonfed the answers. I'll reflect on what you said though.

[Beatrice]

I guess I see it as saying that if I don't "teach" B to use the dictionary, she won't ever want to learn to use it by herself. Which to me is a bit like saying if I don't "teach" H to walk he'll never learn that by himself (he's already proving me wrong on that over the last week or so) or that if I don't teach K to read she'll never be interested in learning (she's off playing Starfall right now).

B and I were talking the other day about how when she's reading in bed and comes across a word she doesn't know, she's realised that if she reads on she can usually work things out from context. Sooner or later she'll start coming across words where she does have to look it up, or ask someone, and if she's reading in bed because she's up later or earlier than the rest of us, then I reckon she'll start keeping a dictionary in bed :) It's an awful lot easier to use a dictionary to check the meaning of a word in front of you than it is to figure out the spelling of something when you're writing, anyway.

I see it as offering a variety of tools to help her continue to explore the things she's interested in, without making the things she's interested conditional on doing them in the way I think she should be doing them, iykwim. That's the quickest way I know of to kill an interest :lol I'm more interested in facilitating her exploration in a way that's appropriate to her level of commitment/development/interest at the time, and trusting that as she grows she'll pick up different tools to use in her own time.

[~*heket*~]

I'm going to learn so much from this discussion. Yous all rock :kotc

[ThirdArmBabySlingProject]

As someone once so eloquently said - if you're crap at grammar and spelling and you spent 12 years in school, what makes you think for one moment your child/ren would be better off at school??? ;-)

[Not that it's quite what you asked for in your OP, but when I first read that, I couldn't believe its obviousness and how most of us miss it in school V not conversations! Food for thought anyway!]

[Chameleon]

I worry about D picking up on my way of spelling. Yes school let me down and all that, but the fact remains that I'm crap at spelling. It interfears with my life as I feel shame when I have to ask ppl how to spell things. Sometimes my spelling is so off that spell check doesn't work. Same with diconarys.

I was a massive reader, well beyond my age group but it didn't really help me. It really is my finial hang up about HSing

[ThirdArmBabySlingProject]

Oh, out of eight children, my most schooled child had amazing, accurate spelling and grammar - until he went to school!

And my second most schooled child (who started school at an earlier age than my first) is the 'worst' (I mean, really poor at it!) at spelling/grammar (and was still a straight A student at school!!!). Oh the irony!

She's also been successful in all her endeavours since becoming school free, even where they include written work.

There's a number of conclusions that can be drawn from that about expected standards...

[Beatrice]

*hugs* Chameleon. I feel the same way about maths, but it's a lot easier to disguise maths anxiety once you've left school - I don't feel judged because *most* people say they hate maths when they leave school. But the fact remains - I do feel shame and anxiety when I try to do maths, which is strong enough that it actually gets in the way of my ability to do it. That is an artifact of school, and while I can't guarantee that my kids will have the same difficulties with learning maths in a school setting - some kids learn maths just fine because methods of classroom teaching happen to coicide with their own learning style - I can pretty much guarantee that if they *do* have difficulties, those difficulties will be magnified and reinforced to the point that not only are they not learning maths, they *are* learning to hate and fear maths, and to feel ashamed and worthless that apparently they are so stupid that they cannot learn it. Kids do internalise the failings of the system as negative self-talk that lasts, in many cases, for the rest of their lives - they don't usually have the judgement available to themselves in the early primary school years to locate the problem where it belongs, in a system which is set up with an insistence that ALL children have to learn the same material at the same time regardless of whether they are ready to learn it. Yes, there is nowadays more understanding of the fact that there are different *ways* of learning, but how much ability will a classroom teacher have to really understand how each child in their class learns individually, over the course of the year which generally is all time they spend in their company? Essentially this just means that the material is presented in different ways to cater for different types of learners, which is a start, but it's still not individually tailored to your child, and it's still making the assumption that all kids are ready to learn the same thing at the same time.

You will not have that problem. You are *already* learning how D learns. As you grow together, you'll stay attuned to her learning style. It will be a lot easier for you to find resources that she finds useful to her. You won't necessarily be subject to the same pressure to force her to start learning something before she's ready to, and even if you do decide that some degree of structured learning is necessary for any reason, the likelihood of her feeling the same levels of shame and embarrassment are lessened if it's done in the context of a loving relationship (although of course parents can fuck this up as well, but the point being we have more investment in not doing so).

In other words, you might worry that you won't do "as good a job" as school might do, but turn that around and ask if you could possibly do a worse one in the event that she *does* find it difficult to learn to spell?