My poor daughter

Belle is enthusiastic. When she grabs a hold of something she doesn't let go for a long time. She works it and works it until she is satisfied that she has done well. Boy, reminds me of someone else I know.

I haven't worried too much about formal writing instruction as of yet (6th) grade. The girl has been working on a story for several months. She started hand writing it in a spiral notebook. It has several chapters, has lots of dialogue in it and is about fairies. That is all I know about it. She won't let me read it. Poor girl, thinks I am going to correct her work or cringe at the mistakes she's made. She's probably not far off the mark, but I promised myself to keep my mouth shut this time.

My hubby got a second computer (a hand me down from my parents) working and now we have this extra at the girls disposal. Because time on my laptop is far and few between. I'm a bit of a computer hog around here.

Belle has decided that she would rather type her story , what she has so far, on the computer and then she can fix and edit as she goes along. Little did she know how poor her spelling skills were. In fact I'm not sure I realized how poor they were. I'd say about every third word is underlined. She's just realizing how bad it is and yet she hangs in there, asking how to spell this and that and we holler from the other room how to spell it. ( The child has been working at this for more than an hour now).

I've made her a small personal dictionary with a list of 1000 most common words and then a page for each letter to list words she uses that are not on the list. That is why I have been doing so much spelling research lately. We've gotta do something about this. Unfortunately the world looks at a poor speller as an uneducated one and I understand that, so we will work hard on it until I am satisfied that she can "look" as brilliant as she is.

Belle is a great reader though and scores high on comprehension tests. She just seemed to get through phonics enough to read and now she flies through books, but I know she skips a lot. In fact when she reads aloud I can tell there are just some words she cannot sound out. Boy, I would have done things a bit differently way back then, had I known what I do now.

By the way, we are going to start using Spelling Plus as soon as she finishes her Evan Moor spelling book.

Susan