For the last week or so, Alex has been working on spelling words that end with consonant-le: uncle, table, maple, and so forth. She started out well enough, dividing the words into syllables and learning to put a silent e on the end so that the second syllable has a vowel.
Then we hit C-le words in which you have to double the consonant, and Alex hit a brick wall.
It all has to do with the distinction between open and closed syllables. Did you learn this as a child? I didn’t. Apparently, when a syllable has a single vowel that is “closed in” by a consonant at the end, the vowel sound is usually short. When a syllable has a single vowel that is not “closed in” by a consonant, the vowel sound is usually long. This rule is why robing and robbing are pronounced differently: ro-bing (o not closed in, long vowel) vs. rob-bing (o closed in, short vowel).
Alex’s spelling curriculum has had her identifying open and closed syllables since early in the first level of the program. So now I taught her that in words like little and paddle you have to double the middle consonant so that the first syllable of the word will be closed: lit-tle, pad-dle. If you didn’t double the t in little, it would have a long i sound (li-tle) and rhyme with title.
Supremely logical, right? Alex dived right in and started doubling consonants like a pro. Except that she seems to have come away with the idea that WHENEVER you know that -le is coming, you should double the consonant before. She was writing words like needdle and marbble.
She tried a list of words and made a bunch of mistakes. I re-explained. She tried some sentence dictation and made a bunch of mistakes. I re-explained again. She re-tried some of the words and made the same mistakes. When she spelled needle with two d‘s for the third time in one twenty-minute lesson, I stopped her.
“You’re really confused about when to double the consonant, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, let’s go back over it one more time.” I knew that the poor kid would scream if I brought out the same ten consonant-le words she had been struggling with again and again.
“…Okay, Alex, what do you know about tweetle beetles?”
A tiny revival. “When tweetle beetles fight, it’s called a tweetle beetle battle.”
“Right.” I made beetle and battle on the whiteboard with magnetic tiles. We divided them into syllables. We saw that battle needs an extra t to make the a say its short sound. We saw that beetle doesn’t want to make a short e sound at all, so there’s nothing for an extra t to do.
Mercifully, my phone chimed just then to say that our twenty minutes were up. But we’ll jump back in tomorrow with a tweetle beetle puddle battle. If need be, we’ll take it all the way to:
When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles, and the bottle’s on a poodle, and the poodle’s eating noodles…they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.
If she can master the spelling of that, I think we stop school for the day and have ice cream.
This isn’t easy right now, but I do appreciate that she’s being given logical reasoning tools for figuring out things I learned through brute memorization. And I value that with homeschooling we don’t have to sweep on to the next concept while she’s still confused. We can just park here until she gets it figured out.
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Hi! We use All About Spelling too and I love the tools they teach for figuring out how to spell words. I have always been a good speller, but I sure didn’t learn those rules in school!! Love your blog, btw, I am just awful about leaving comments.
Tweetle beetles is my favorite thing to read in that book. I love rocking it at speed.
I think I will get this book. I never learned to spell, just did it, so I have no idea how to teach it.
Ailbhe, if you want an explanation of all the rules and some idea of how to teach them, I’ve heard that the thing to get is How to Teach Spelling. It’s a one-volume resource that lays out the spelling patterns/rules. All About Spelling is a step-by-step scripted spelling program with lots of levels and books, and it doesn’t seem like it would be a good fit for the way you guys do things.
Oh, yes, that seems likely, and there are workbooks. Certain People like workbooks, as long as they can start in the middle and do the bits they like and only do the beginnings at the end… thanks!
Lis was reading an article to me about the history of English orthography.
The thing is . . . logically, Alex is right. Once upon a time, English orthography was pretty simple. A female monarch was a “cwin”. Honestly, if you think about it, it’s rather EASIER to read Middle English than it is to read modern English. . . and by Middle English, weirdness had already started.
Over time, all SORTS of weird things happened. You’ve got groups of people in the Middle Ages studying etymology and back-forming spellings of words based on what they believe the Latin root is — the word “det” or “dette” being changed to “debt”, for instance, because “debitus” has a “b” in it. Totally arbitrary change. You’ve got Dutch printer apprentices who don’t speak much English throwing “h” in after “g” because that’s what you do in Dutch, leading to “ghost” and “ghastly”. You’ve got all SORTS of craziness.
The word “aisle” is one she pointed out to me particularly: it’s basically the same word as “alley” — a walkable gap between two structures. Originally spelled “ile.” But then people started being worried that people would confuse it with “isle”, as in “island”. Which is why they put the silent “s” in what was originally “ile” and “iland” or “yland”.
It just gets worse from there. The rules of English orthography just plain don’t make sense. And yet . . . somehow Alex IS figuring them out. There IS some sort of underlying emergent logic that leads to SOME sort of baseline ruleset.
It’s just . . . not obvious, and has lots of exceptions.
“Oh dearest creature in creation . . . “
Ian, I agree that a lot of needless complication has been introduced into English spelling, and that – despite the efforts of spelling reformists like Daniel Webster – we’re pretty much stuck with a lot of ancient nonsense. However, I don’t think that the situation is quite as anarchic as you suggest. There are a limited number of phonograms (sound-letter correspondences) in English, and a limited number of legal ways to combine them. There are rules which cover the majority of the ground.
We tend to understate the usefulness of phonics for two reasons, I think. First of all, it’s fun. Once you figure out you can spell fish “ghoti” (although you can’t really) or write a sentence like “The tough coughs as he ploughs the dough,” you’re not likely to forget how awesome those examples of clever wordplay are. They’re a lot more vivid in the mind than all the words that plod along following the rules.
The other reason is that phonics has been poorly taught in America for at least 50 years, since the era of Dick and Jane. I think most people don’t even have any idea of what phonics can do; they see what they think are constant violations of phonics rules, when actually many of those words are just following patterns they were never taught. So you’ll hear people claim that kids need to just memorize the Dolsch sight word lists because those words are “irregular” – when in fact almost all of them conform to regular phonics patterns.
Teachers don’t even necessarily know. I once saw an e-mail from an elementary school teacher that said, “We also have kids figure out words by looking at the sound of the first and last letter – this used to be called phonics.” No. Phonics is having kids look at the sounds of all the letters, and knowing the letters and letter combinations that make more than one sound. But if even an elementary teacher thinks that “look at the first and last sounds and guess” is phonics, no wonder people have a poor opinion about how far phonics will take you.
Yes, it’s true that a lot of English words are spelled the way they are for no particular reason. But most of the words in common use still follow rules and patterns, even if those rules don’t make any intrinsic sense. One of the rules Alex has learned is that “English words don’t end in i, j, u, or v.” Now, that rule is totally arbitrary. There’s no reason why English words shouldn’t end in those letters. But with very few exceptions (the pronoun I is one of them), the only words that break this rule are loan words from other languages. (Ski, spaghetti, pi, menu, impromptu…) So Alex has learned to stick on a silent e when she spells words like have, give, blue, and due, to use a y to end words like my, try, and fly, and to use ge when she hears the /j/ sound at the end of a word. That one rule, nonsensical though it may be, takes her a long way in English spelling.
Hmm. This is sounding like a separate post.
I agree that the more one can learn about the sounds-letters correspondences, the more it becomes clear what the spelling and pronunciation rules are. I also found it helpful to learn Latin and learn something about word etymology and deduce other rules from that. The way my brain works (and maybe the relative rates at which I learned reading and spelling) means that I’m really good at sight-recognition and reproduction, though.
Someone I helped to educate was not good at that, but was very fond of following rules in all areas of life. One of my achievements as a parent was to recognise that this person’s spelling difficulties in both English and French could be ameliorated by offering more rules (with authorities), and to help the person find the rules and patterns, rather than to repeat what the teachers said about how the simple rules didn’t always work and you had to memorize. I did not know to look for books, though – mine were mostly stuff about Latin and etymology.
At some point when Alex is older you guys might have fun with a program called The Word Within the Word. We use this starting in grade 7 for three years. Its focus is the stems of words and their literal, original meanings. It also tells you what language they originated from.
My kids have a lot of fun with it, because once they start learning the stems they end up dissecting new words to determine their meaning. It also helps with spelling of a number of new-to-them words.
By the way, the book Lis has been reading to me is RIGHTING THE MOTHER TONGUE by David Wolman. The stuff Lis has read to me is the sort of stuff that I bet Alex would be fascinated by — it fascinates me, anyway. Amazon reviews suggest that later chapters get a bit bogged down in places, but, if Alex wants a change of pace at some point, looking at “how English spelling got that way” might be a fun direction to explore.
Also, I jokingly bristle at the idea of “loan words from other languages” in English. That implies that there exists a word in English that ISN’T a loan word from another language.
That’s what makes studying the history of English so amazingly interesting — we’ve got Norse, and Germanic, and Latin, and Old French, and Greek, and every other thing you can imagine in there.
JW, that’s Michael Clay Thompson, isn’t it! I have his elementary language arts curriculum on the shelf and ready to go for next fall: grammar, writing, vocabulary, poetics. I heard him speak – he was mesmerizing. How cool that you guys use his materials in your school.
Ian, thanks for the book recommendation. As I recall, you’re the one who turned us on to How the States Got Their Shapes, too. You’re a trusted resource.
Hobbitbabe, that’s great that you were able to divine some of the rules and communicate them. I, like you and like many other people who are successful in higher education and become teachers, am also very good at seeing things and memorizing them. I think that a lot of the time it’s hard for people with that skill to figure out how(or even why) to explain things a different way for learners whose strengths are not in that area. As you say, being urged to memorize harder is not very helpful.
Alex also has a great memory for symbols. We never finished phonics for reading because she tore ahead so quickly once she’d cracked the basic code. I’m really glad she’s learning the rules now, through spelling, though. I think there’s value in understanding as much of the structure as possible. If nothing else, it may keep her from embarrassment at mispronouncing a word she’s only ever read. I had that problem a few million times.
Yes, Michael Clay Thompson. I didn’t realise he had a whole elementary program as well – we only use The Word Within the Word. As I said above, it’s a fantastic program, although the publisher is in dire need of a good editor as there are frequent errors in the tests.