It has been a little more than a month since I last posted here. That's because I was vomiting too frequently due to my third pregnancy. Most days, I was just in bed... not having energy to do many basic things.
Last week, I felt a bit better, vomited less and I was able to get out of bed longer. I was happy to spend more quality time with the kids and to do other things that I needed and liked.
So, starting last week, I tried doing more of the things I used to do with the kids in our homeschool. In the past two months, I only had energy to read books to them while I was in bed.
Yesterday afternoon while it was raining, we sang the song "Incy Wincy Spider..." After singing the song, I asked my eldest son who just drew a spider on a piece of paper to spell the word SPIDER. He initially said that he didn't know how to spell the word. But I thought that he just didn't want to. So, I asked him to try first and not say he doesn't know right away. He did try and he spelled it correctly. After that, I asked him again to spell another word from the lyrics of the song. He spelled WATER next then RAIN. He was also hesitant to spell water and I had to encourage him to try again just like when he spelled SPIDER. He didn't say anything anymore when I asked him to spell RAIN. He just wrote it on his paper. But he was somehow irritated and surprised when I asked him to spell SUN.
If I read his mind correctly, he must have thought, "Mommy, that's too basic for me. Of course, I know how to spell that." I actually know that he already learned to spell that word years ago when he was just two years old but I wanted to test if he still remembers it. (My son has a tendency to resist being asked things/concepts that he has mastered long ago. We started noticing this when he was over two years old and we or other friends would ask him what nursery songs he can sing or knows. A lot of times, he simply would not answer because he mastered the two cds of nursery songs we had in the house at that time when he was less than two years old. Aside from being word smart, he is also music smart so at an early age, he can identify/guess the song by simply hearing the instrumental part of the intro. He was more interested then to learn songs from different genres. That's one of the challenges I discovered in raising and teaching gifted kids.) So, after asking him to spell SUN, I asked him to spell a longer word from the lyrics next -- SPOUT. The last word I asked him to spell was CLOUD. It was the only word that he misspelled. He spelled it CLOD. Thus, he spelled 5 out of 6 words correctly.
I told him that it's alright that he made a mistake in spelling CLOUD since he just missed one letter. I also told him that I'm confident he would spell it correctly next time. I also pointed out to him that he already knows how to spell a lot of words and that he should not answer "I don't know" right away when being asked to spell. I reminded him that by sounding out the letters carefully as he pronounced the words, he would eventually have a clue on how to spell them correctly. We've been using phonics to help him spell words since he was two years old and I would say that it really helped. I learned this style of teaching him spelling through the show Word World.
Later that day, I overheard him spell COTTON to our maid. :)
If you are looking for toys that can help teach your kids to spell or improve your kids' spelling skills, here's my review of a product that we bought our son when he was two years old. Click here.
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