Stacey & Zach on Spelling Rules

I've been trying to integrate more games into OG lessons... on Saturday, we did the session entirely in games, moving away from the standard OG lesson for that day. We used spelling cards and I got them to verbalise the rules whenever they made a mistake. We used sorting cards for the "tch vs. ch", "dge vs. ge" and "ck vs k" words, explaining over and over again when to use what.

Zach was a challenge because he would keep relying on his visual memory to tell himself which words were correct instead of using the rules to sort out the words.

Zach is constantly a challenge because he has such a good visual memory bank... there are so many words that he already knows, so I'm constantly trying to find words that he doesn't know so he can rely on sounding them instead of on his pre-knowledge of the spelling. argh!

Stacey's progress

It's a fine line as usual, treading between challenging Stacey and not demoralising her... but she's getting a little complacent with the easier words and complains whenever the words are a little more complex and she's required to think... and she hates making mistakes...

So in order to motivate her to put her whining and attitude aside, I've got to entice her with games and such...

We've moved into the vowel digraphs... having just covered "oy" yesterday... and with that came the concept of positions...

We also recapped syllabication because I want her to move into Penny words on Saturday... and that will lead us into open syllables with long vowels... but she already knows long vowels, so I don't think that will be a problem.

We're also working on more spelling words based on rules... so looking at what to look out for, so that she knows when she has to apply a rule. But really, it's also building up her visual memory bank, so that she's exposed to the words many many times over so that she gets so familiar.

I had a proud mommy moment the other day when she successfully applied the FLOSS rule to her tamagotchi pet in naming it Bess... when I heard her say she wanted to name her pet /bes/, I thought that she would spell it as "Bes"... so I was pleasantly surprised to see that she had applied her floss rule successfully and had remembered to double the "s" at the end...

Zach - Tuesday's lesson

We're making OG lessons a priority... just like we would be forced to if we were sending Zach for OG intervention outside.... so it takes priority over homework, in the sense that we do it even before he sets out doing homework, or we make sure we get the lesson done before he goes to bed.

Am plunging him into rules, rules and more rules... rules about syllables, rules about sounds, rules about position and so on... it's a lot for him to digest, but as Ron is always saying "bump it up!" So Tuesday's lesson we finished covering the lower level rules, and I'm bumping him up into syllabication quickly, covering closed syllables, v-c-e syllables, Rabbit words and Reptile words all in the next lesson. But I know he can.

He's quickly got the hang of fingerspelling... and like the EP said, once he gets the hang of something, he's really fast... and he has flown with fingerspelling. I try to give him words I'm pretty sure he doesn't know (and I'm right because halfway through yesterday's lesson he said, "these are nonsense words right?" and I'm like, no... these are real words! LOL!) so that he's forced to sound them and work with the rules he's learnt and just practising applying them and figuring out what to look for so that he knows when he should apply what rule... of course, it doesn't help that the English language is full of contradictions and exceptions... sigh.

But I'm looking forward to the day when his dyslexia fades into the background because all these things will become 2nd-nature. I hope that for all my students, present and future... my own kids included, of course.

Back breaking...

I spent quite a few back breaking hours today making game pieces for future OG lessons...

First I had to make a copy of the sheet of game pieces... then I highlighted them different colours just to make them look pretty, and cut them out in long strips. I put double sided tape on them, then cut them into their individual squares. Then I removed the tapes and pasted them onto 200gsm blue paper, and cut them up again into squares (now highlighted with a blue frame around) then arranged them onto hot laminate backing, and ran the two sheets through my hot laminator... then cut up the freshly laminated pieces, making sure to round the edges.

All that, just so the kids can have a slightly more fun time differentiating between dge, ge, tch, ch, c, k and so on... but I figure, since I'm doing this for at least 3 kids right now, and hopefully more in the future, this investment in time, effort and some money is well worth it... but I need to convince my aching back and shoulder muscles that this is true.... :P

Zach's 2nd lesson

I've decided that since Zach already knows so many of the sounds, I'll teach him those that he doesn't know, and plunge straight into rules... so that's what we did. Like Stace this week, we covered the c vs k for /k/, dge vs ge vs g vs j for /j/, and the FLOSS rule... I wanted to do more, but I could see that he was very tired by the end of about 40 minutes, so I took out the spelling cards and got him to think the rules through to spell words.

The trouble with teaching Zach is that he is so familiar with the simpler words, I have to move on to the harder ones to bump him up as well as to force him to blend and apply the rules, instead of relying on his superior visual memory.

A shortcut way to do things would be to use his visual memory and just give him word lists to memorise, which he would do easily... but that would defeat the purpose, since he would not be able to memorise and understand the many gazillion words in the English language... not to mention the many other words in the specialised fields he will eventually take up.

Thus I'm keen to quickly familiarise him with the sounds and their rules, then move into suffixes, prefixes as well as syllabication... again the challenge with syllabication is that he is already familiar with so many words, that he wouldn't really be dividing them according to the rules, just plunging straight into reading them as he remembers. And to ask him to divide it up anyway if he already knows the word will only lead to frustration because he sees it as a redundant exercise.... sigh.

I think games is my only solution to this problem... cos if anything is a game, it doesn't matter if it's easy or redundant... then winning by following the rules is what gets us there!

Reptiles, Rabbits and Rules...

On Saturday, Stacey went through more Reptile words, Rabbit words, and learnt a new rule regarding the -ld, -nd and -st words... so no new phonogram for her.

It occurs to me that she should also be learning the rules for the c/k/ck sounds, the j/dge/ge sounds, the ch/tch sounds and so on... because she's starting to get confused about which sound to use, as her repertoire of sounds expand. So I will be looking to see where exactly it falls in the Scope and Sequence of things, and how to incorporate it all in. I also need to look into making lessons more fun... now that I am trying to follow the OG lesson plans more closely, I find myself not having enough time to do the fun things and cover everything in the lesson plans as well. So it's going to be a little give and take. Otherwise, OG lessons become such a chore.

I bought the Go Phonics set of games and readers and stuff, so I have to start incorporating all that into the lessons. Stacey is always thrilled to play games, even if she is exercising the very same skills, just that she doesn't have to write it out on a sheet of paper. *grin*