Thursday, February 17, 2011

There are times when I begin to question where we are in our school work, and where we are headed. Last year, I gave up on formal spelling lessons. Matthew would work and work at his spelling, and every time he'd miss a word, it threw his whole day into chaos. A single mistake would result in tears of frustration, statements of absolute dejection- "I'm just stupid, I can't do anything right," etc.

So we just stopped. I told myself that it wasn't that important- he could read, after all, and spelling would eventually come too. He really did quite well for his age; he was working ahead of level but just couldn't handle the emotional aspect of making mistakes. Anna was struggling with spelling as well; it seemed that the program they used to teach reading when she was in public school had not prepared her well for sounding out and spelling words. However, I'm a stickler for spelling myself. I find spelling mistakes to be horribly distracting, and "giving up" on spelling felt wrong.

Yet we did. We played on Spellingcity.com. We completed lots of writing activities, read voraciously, and I answered endless "how do you spell...?" questions, but we never cracked open the spelling book. It sat on the shelf, unused and dusty, for the better part of a year.

Yesterday, Matthew pulled the spelling book off the shelf, and said, "We should do this. I love this program, and we haven't done it for a long time." Five minutes later, we were taking the placement test to see where we should start at this time.

It turns out, our "informal" learning worked just fine. Matthew and Anna both tested a full grade level ahead of the grade they would be in were they in public school. It reassured me; restored my confidence in our eclectic/unschooling ever-changing method of learning. Occasionally, you just have to let go.