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Requesting permission to completely drop spelling.


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My 4th grader has almost never met a word she can't just naturally spell. She has a terrific visual memory for words.

 

Spelling Power just seems like a waste of time. I haven't picked up the book in a while because it seems so unnecessary. It's looking at me from the shelf and starting to make me feel guilty for not at least dusting off the cover.

 

So, I'm thinking that with the amount of writing she's doing (IEW and really keeping up well with enthusiasm), it would be fine to let things go and just take spelling "lessons" from any she misspells in composition. The only hiccup there is that she mostly keyboards her essay work, so the spellcheck might be buoying her up (hey, maybe I should just turn off that feature...).

 

Anyway, I would love to hear any thoughts you have about continuing to teach spelling beyond a certain point. She will be dropping it much earlier than my other kids did, but they did quit spelling lessons by 8th grade so I suppose she would be done by then anyway. Fourth grade just seems a bit early. Waffling here. Please tell me what y'all think. My SP book was purchased in 1999, I think, is on the fourth kid and frankly it's ready for a bonfire.

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You are fine to drop it. We did, too. Periodically I will throw out a crazy word for Ds to spell just as a fun puzzler. The last one I remember was dodecahedron. Ds finds this quite fun. It is my way to check in and see that the years of spelling are still in there even if we have finished up Sequential Spelling.

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Here's another perspective on spelling, namely it can be fun for a good speller to be even better.  I too was a natural speller as a kid, but in the 8th grade my teacher had a radical idea to have each kid bring in every week, 10 words he could not spell, and use those as his personal spelling words.  So each kid had a different set of words.  Unfortunately for me I could not find 10 such words anywhere, ever.  I could spell phthisic, antidisestablishmentarianism, asafoetida, daguerreotype, eleemosynary, victuals (pronounced: "vittles") whatever.  In fact I was already a regular panel member on a competitive radio spelling show where I usually won the first prize money.  

 

But the teacher was very adamant (read: jerk) so I made a concerted effort to find new spelling words. It turned out there were a few I did not know, like hemorrhage, minuscule, chartreuse, and I began to take some satisfaction in the fact that although I never found 10 words in any week that I could not spell, I readily found plenty that my teacher could not spell.

 

Then as an adult I found out about the scripps-howard (?) spelling contests and those books have zillions of virtually unspellable words for even a good natural speller.  So spelling is another potentially fun activity if you are good at it.  Of course it makes little sense to continue through the routine spelling words weak spellers use, but learning appropriate words may be a good idea.  Why blow off one of the natural gifts your child has, by declining to develop it?  It is a good way to learn vocabulary too.  And I love identifying the original linguistic roots of various derived words coming from Greek or Latin.  But of course you should do exactly what you find suits your situation best.  So, permission certainly granted, just another glimpse at various possibilities, maybe enjoyable as a diversion from time to time.

 

As to spell checkers, they just annoy me, because they have such limited vocabularies that, although they do find my typing errors,  they also regularly change my correct words to something incorrect.  In fact the latest versions of the browser "safari" preferred by macs, has a setting for automatic spell "correcting", without alerting you to the fact that it has just rendered your email message incorrectly.  Because of that the company filing my tax return sent a wrong street address to the IRS yesterday on my behalf, because safari thought my street name should be something else more familiar than it is!  And this feature has a bug in it on my computer that causes it to resume even after it is turned off.

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What a great post, mathwonk!

 

I will continue to try to challenge her with vocabulary and word roots; hopefully many will be recognized as we work through our Latin and Greek. I don't think she's chomping at the bit for spelling as fun, since she's turned down spelling competition opportunities in the past. But I'll have to ask her some of the words you mentioned above!

 

I hate the autocorrect - it so often changes entire words! Frustrating.

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thank you for the generous response!  but be careful with your daughter, as these words are not likely to be possible without practice.  e.g. phthisic is pronounced "tizik", (and is a respiratory disease).  (My teacher pronounced it "phuthoosik".)  No one is going to get that sort of thing unaided.  I wanted to admit I could only spell these crazy ones after I started practicing.

 

"minuscule" offers a good lesson, since the root is that of minute rather than that of miniature.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I dropped it after K!  I would randomly get out spelling power and check his progress, and he kept progressing, so I didn't worry about it.  He ceilinged the WJ-III spelling subtest last spring, so I don't even check his progress anymore.

 

 

All that to say, I think it's totally fine to drop it! 

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