Spicy Dragons & Dinosaurs

It is late.

I've listened to two online lectures today and almost finished all the week's reading. One more pre-test to fill out tomorrow, and a bit of work on my list of goals. Coming to a bit of an unformed idea about my year-long project but as of yet I am inarticulate and a bit confused. Tomorrow I will talk to my mentor, Barb, and she will help (and also tell me how brilliant I am -- Isn't that so nice?).

PTO has taken any free time these days. I have help for which I am so thankful. I love doing it but if I am ever going to weed my garden and clean my house, I better get more organized.

I said good bye to a friend tonight. This is not a good time to be losing anyone, but it was not up to me.

I wonder about loss and strength and enduring. It all just sucks.

Julia brought home a list of 12 spelling words at the beginning of the week. Easy words in three rhyming families that most 3rd graders would have no problem with at all. There was also a "work sheet" for the words on which the child writes the word, then checks three columns as she reads the word, spells the word while looking at it, and spells the word with her eyes closed, and a final column where she is supposed to write the word without looking at it. I have been trying to figure out how to work on this all week, talked to Marilyn about it today, and wrote the following email to Julia's teachers tonight:

I wonder if we could take some time to talk about Julia’s reading/writing curriculum. I assume that you’ve finished testing and assessing Julia’s reading level, and I was wondering if you think that Julia is ready for the spelling words that were sent home this week, as well as the spelling sheet with directions. I could not comfortably work it into our week, and after reflection, I see a few problems with the spelling assignment for Julia, at least at the present time:

1. Julia doesn’t understand the concept of rhyming words completely. Julia and I have been working in a rhyming workbook and she is getting better at recognizing words that sound the same, but I have not found that she understands that to spell words like pan, dan, can, the “an” stays the same and the first letter changes. Julia and I have worked on some rhyming families and to Julia each words still has to be sounded out and spelled separately. Thus, a list of 12 words (that are really just three families of words) represents a lot of spelling work for her. Possibly more than she can handle right now.

1. We have worked with sight word flash cards and this has been somewhat successful when the words that we are working on come from a story that she is interested in reading. However, when I tried to expand to words that were not story connected, I had less success. For Julia, the key to learning is her desire to master some skill or task. Learning for its own sake, or learning because she has been directed to learn, has no value for her yet. I hope that a student persona takes root in Julia one day, but I don’t think we are there yet, making a list of unrelated spelling words a pretty daunting assignment.

1. Julia has learned to read (to the extent that she can read) by going over books and words over and over. I think that most of the words she knows are memorized, but we have not worked on memorization per se. Filling out the spelling sheet is rather dry memorization work. I just don’t see doing it without lots of resistance, at least right now, and unless you can convince me that she is really ready for this kind of work (and maybe you can), I don’t want our at-home school work to be fraught with resistance.

1. Julia is very interested in pleasing her teachers this year and I am so happy to see this. This is the first time that she is reporting some measure of success at school. She feels that it is possible to meet the expectations in the classroom. She comes home and tells me that she has worked hard at school and she says it happily. Although I want her to move along with her work, I do want to insure her success at this point. She does not have a history of school success and so, I do not feel comfortable with stretching her ability too far.

Finally, and this has nothing to do with the spelling assignment but about Julia’s life. Julia does approximately 26 hours as week of therapy outside of school -- intensive autism therapy, OT, speech, and attachment therapy. Julia does three or four hours of therapy after a full day of school every day. We are incorporating reading into her therapy time and I think Julia is ready for this. We can try to do the spelling as well, but I really need to be convinced that this kind of spelling work should trump some of the other therapy goals that we are working on.

I write not to criticize but with concern. I am not trying to second guess methods that I hardly understand. Please be patient with me. I am probably feeling much too protective, but this is the first time that Julia has been happy and willing to go to school. And I want her to learn and to love learning so much.

All the best,