Why I love SWR

I  wasn’t a fluent reader until the end of 2nd grade.  My mother advocated behind the scenes for me to get into a 2nd grade classroom where phonics were emphasized, I’d had a more whole language 1st grade classroom.  Meanwhile she and my father read aloud to me every night, answered my questions, and included me in their conversations.  We’d read all of the Little House books, all the Chronicles Narnia, and some Madeleine L’Engle by 1st grade, this while they were both working, and Dad was finishing up his Batchelor’s degree. 

I remember thinking how useless the alphabet song was to remember how to read, because I knew the letter names, but the sounds were different.  And I knew the upper case letters just fine, but lower case ‘g’ looked nothing like it’s print version, it looked like a pair of glasses, and I often got stuck on the word "the" because as a Pennslyvania/New York girl, I pronounced it more like "tha" or even "dah."  what was that e doing there?  Plus I’d been taught explicitly that "th" made the unvoiced sound, not the voiced one.  So I had to remember some "rule breaker sounds" to read/write a word that I pronounced differently any how.  I hated how illogical it all was, and looked forward to math class.  With arithmetic, if I’d forgotten something, I could always figure it out, it would have more than one way of getting to an answer even if my memory was faulty.

By third grade, I was reading voraciously.  The Secret Garden, the Oz books, I attempted the Lord of the Rings.  I loved the book of Revelation (all those weird beasts!).  But I couldn’t spell.  And my printing was weird.  But we had cursive to wander through.  I began having a "special" notebook of words I’d gotten wrong in writing to look at each night.  Mom bought me cross word puzzles and word games.  To this day at family gatherings I want to hide when someone pulls out a boggle game.  Though I love the strategy/math games.

We did have decent spelling text books that often emphasized different rules of English spelling, but with one rule a week, lazy me remembered it for that week, and did not fold it into my writing.  I’d figure out the pattern, then fill in all the blanks.  For the Friday quiz, I’d memorize odd mispronunciations to incorporate all of the "silent letters" and remember them. That is on the weeks I studied before Thursday.  Often I’d cram Friday morning in the hall way lining up to go to my homeroom.  I figured it wouldn’t work anyway, so why spend time on it?

In 7th grade I got to study French.  My cousin the language teacher tells me that the ALM method of instruction is passe, but the one thing I loved was that we weren’t taught "silent letter."  Or "blends."  If a group of letters consistently made the same sound, then we learned that letter group as one unit, or phonogram.   I could spell in French much better than I could spell in English.  I later (much, much later) wondered if there was a way of teaching English spelling that was like this.

One of the reasons that  I majored in chemistry in college, besides loving to use my hands, and not understanding the quantum mechanical model of the atom was that I knew I’d have fewer papers to write.  Problem set?  Bring it on.  Formal Lab?  Ugh, but at least it was only once or twice a year.   Writing papers was oddly easier in semesters that I had several classes requiring papers, the more I had to write, the easier it was.  It did seem like an impossible thing for me to conquer though, even with access to computers. 

After college, my husband took some night classes at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.  I audited as many as I could.  (This was before kids when we thought we were busy and broke!)  In our Greek class, we were taught the lower case letters, and just referred to the upper case letters in a chart when we needed them.  We also learned the most common words first, not words in pattern of spelling.   By the end of the 3rd week, I could open a Greek New Testament to any page and find the article.  The article is not too exciting, but in an inflected language, the article is your friend!  Any way, starting with the lower case letters, and most common words was a good thing.  I wondered (much) later if there was a way of teaching English spelling that also did this: common words first, lower case letters first, phonograms not "silent letters," the fact that letters make more than one sound being told up front, not left as a scary secret, and using the "mispronounce" it way to remember all the letters.

When I was thinking about home schooling, the thing everyone worried about was that I would be the one teaching the spelling (math, bring it on.  socialization, well, your brother-in-laws turned out OK.  BUT CHRIS is going to teach SPELLING?)  I wailed to my "Elmer" L, the classical homeschooler that there were probably no spelling texts that explained all the rule breakers.  she pointed  me to Ramalda Spaulding’s "The Writing Road to Reading."  I felt like I was starting  a diet and exercise program.  But it made sense.  Common words first.  Groups of letters taught as phonograms.  Lower case letters first.  No letter names, refer to letters by the sounds they make, all the sounds in order of their most common sounds to rarer ones.  My aunt the excellent public school teacher stopped worrying about us once she heard that I would be using the Spaulding method.

How did it all work out?  Well, B had handwriting problems (did I put that in the past tense?) and some speech difficulties.  His speech therapist was nervous of my chosen method of instruction, nudging me towards some more whole language methods, and especially balked at the idea of referring to the letters by the sounds they make, not their names.  B loved having a novel adult, and to this day would rather call letters by the letter names than refer to them by the sounds they make (in the order of frequency of use) his therapist MUST be write, not MOM…  His phonemic awareness got better, and people began to understand him even on the phone.

And I’m so grateful there is a logical way to learn to spell it, to point out the order that is there, even if it’s an organic sort of order, like a coral reef.