Mom, how do you spell DOUGH?

I find writing even better than reading for teaching phonics. It's a slower process, which allows more time to think about letter sounds and talk about rules without getting frustrated and losing comprehension. Here are two examples from our morning:

My 4-year-old daughter is very motivated to learn to read and write at the moment. This is not always convenient, but I try to drop what I'm doing to sit and help her when she is interested. Knowing that reading and writing get me to stop what I'm doing and pay attention to them gives my kids a positive attention-getting strategy; I think that's another reason my kids love to read and write. Today she was writing something about a wizard whose wand didn't work (today's letter focus suddenly became W). Instead of just telling her the letters when she asks me how to spell something, I say the sounds slowly and try to help her remember which letter makes that sound. The process of remembering how to write a letter requires a different kind of recall than seeing the letter and knowing the name and sound. This type of practice cements the letters and sounds in the young reader's brain. Writing also helps set sight words in concrete. As kids get more confident in remembering the letters and sounds, it is fun to have them try to sound out words on their own and praise them for how many sounds they recognized, even if it's just the first sound or the Z in the middle of WIZARD.

My 8-year-old son d-r-a-g-s his feet when I ask him to write. I try to give him writing projects that he will enjoy, but I often miss the mark. Writing about his pet cockroaches or his team of super dogs (stuffed animals) have been winning topics. Writing about field trips or what he learned from the Disney Imagineering science video (today's project) tend to be more of a struggle, but I know they are important for retaining what he has learned. During today's journal writing activity, he asked me how to spell DOUGH. I had to ask, "Which kind of dough... doe, do or dough?" :) Then he asked me how to spell HIGH, qualifying it by saying he knew how to spell HI. These experiences are rich vocabulary builders, opportunities to learn about parts of speech, and discover more complex phoneme patterns. The way I choose to do spelling is to take the words that he struggles with and turn them into his spelling words, adding other words that may share the same pattern. For example, next week's spelling list might include HIGH, LIGHT, SIGH, FLIGHT, DOUGH, THOUGH, DOE, WOE. (Woe would be fun to use in a sentence. "The work my mom gave me filled me with woe." I think I'll have to use that.)