Laureen

Heya!

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Jenny C <jenstarc4@...> wrote:
> My own late reader, spells really well too. I think for her, it had to
> do with collecting words. She'd see a word, ask me what it said, I'd
> tell her and she rarely forgot it after that. Once she knew enough
> words, she was able to read fluently. So all those words, she knew by
> how they looked first, not how they sounded. It's a different way of
> learning how to read than the system used in schools of sounding out of
> words, which made absolutely no sense to her before she knew how to
> read.

::waving madly:: That's us too! Although I'm not sure Rowan's a late
reader (he's six), he is all about the shape and the color and the
size and the font of the word. My mother, who is a librarian, picked
him out a copy of "Max's Words",
(http://www.amazon.com/Maxs-Words-Kate-Banks/dp/0374399492) and
launched his "word collection". He has a latching green plastic box,
and a pair of scissors, and all forms of printed recyclable material
that enter my home get examined for interesting words, which are then
cut out and put in the box.

It's funny; he adores words, but isn't so interested in putting them
together. I've suggested that it's a lot like legos, where you take
the pieces and connect them in your own way to form your own thing,
unless it's like following the lego directions, where you build
something according to someone else's rules (like haiku). He likes the
idea but isn't ready to leap there yet. However if you take it down a
level, he's fascinated by how the letters go together. He adores
spelling. He spells words in conversation rather than saying them.
He's constantly asking how things are spelled, and from the outside,
it looks soooooooo schoolish. I would *never* have drilled him in
spelling the way he's asking to be drilled. But as long as he's asking
and it's making him happy, we're rolling with it.

--
~~L!

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Writing here:
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Evolving here:
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