Sonya, ULW and Spelling wisdom

Sonya is currently taking a much needed vacation. I passed your question on to her and she will answer when she is able.

Hi, Jill. Thanks for your patience until I got back. I need a little more information, please. Which ULW book are you doing? Are you starting at the beginning? How old is your student?

Thanks, Jill! So for your situation, the sequence should look like this:

1. Follow the instructions in the ULW2 lesson. It will have the student read the SW passage and answer the grammar portion of the lesson.

2. The final step in the ULW lesson is to prepare the SW passage (or a portion of it) for dictation. To do that, have your student read through the passage again and look for words she isn’t sure she knows how to spell. If you think she left some word(s) off her list, feel free to quiz her orally on the that word. Your sweet spot will be no more than 3 or 4 unfamiliar words. If she is identifying more than that number, back off on the length.

3. Your student should study those unfamiliar words to learn their spellings however she learns best. If copying them (or copying the sentence) is of great help to her, then she should transcribe it; but if writing the words/sentence isn’t how she learns best, don’t use that method. If she is more of an auditory learner or a kinesthetic learner, she may learn better by saying the spellings or building the words with letter tiles. So tailor her study methods to what works best for her. This step could take 5 minutes or could take a day or two, depending on the child.

It is your call whether to require all of the punctuation in place too right now. If this is her first go at dictation and she is a bit overwhelmed, you may want to focus on the spelling first, then once she gets the hang of it, add in correct punctuation as a requirement too. You decide. A good way to help her study the punctuation is to ask her to explain why each mark is in the sentence.

3. Once your student thinks she can write the assignment correctly (whether that means just the spelling or both the spelling and punctuation at this stage), it’s time for you to set her up for success. Ask her to spell the word(s) she was studying; she can do this spelling orally. If she struggles, she’s not ready for dictation yet. You may want to help her study the word more. If she can spell the word(s) correctly, go ahead and dictate for her to write the assigned passage/portion.

(The SW book doesn’t give a preferred length of the passage, because that information wasn’t available when it was written; but now that we have more information on lengths that Charlotte used, I’m recommending that the assigned study/dictation passage for 5th grade be 2 or 3 sentences at most and 6th grade be 3 or 4 sentences at most. Just FYI.)

If you follow those steps—not dictating until she has identified, studied, and reviewed the words—mistakes should be few and far between.

As far as pace goes, if you need to set aside a little time each day to study the identified words in the passage, go ahead and do that. I wouldn’t recommend that you move on in either SW or ULW until she has learned those words and written that assigned passage/portion. If it’s only 3 or 4 words, it shouldn’t take too long. But either way, it’s more important to move at the student’s pace than to finish a book in two years.

For 7th grade, I recommend assigning and dictating up to one paragraph. So keep in mind how many words she is working on and adjust as needed. You have leeway.

For your 10yo, if you are doing the ULW1 along with the SW1, it has the student do transcription for the first 70 lessons or so, in order to help her make the transition from copywork to dictation. If you are doing only the SW, it’s your choice whether you want her to (1) transcribe, and then you can ask her to write a short phrase without looking after that, or (2) study the passage, or a portion of it, for dictation. Go at her pace, but be careful you don’t camp out so long on one passage that it becomes tedious.

RE the multiplication facts, have you tried the method described in the Mathematics: An Instrument for Living Teaching book? She would build the table for, say, the 2s, using objects around the house (perhaps pennies or beads or buttons) and then write it on a white board. Then take some time to look at it and try to visualize it in her head. Then say it through several times aloud (2 times 1 is 2; 2 times 2 is 4; etc.). Then you erase a number or two and she tries to fill in the missing numbers, then says the table aloud again; repeat that step several times. Then orally practice using the table with some interesting equations/word problems, allowing her to look at it (Six 2s are? How many are 2 taken 7 times? How many 2s in 12? How much do 7 marbles cost at 2¢ each? etc.) Once she can answer the equations and word problems without referring to the table, she can write the table in her math notebook and move on to the next one.

Perhaps some of those ideas will be helpful for you and her.

Congratulations on the twins! What a blessing—yes, a busy blessing!

Mathematics: An Instrument for Living Teaching is an overview of Charlotte Mason methods for elementary arithmetic all the way through algebra and geometry.

If she is just struggling with three tables, yes, keep going with her regular curriculum and just do a little 10-minute multiplication-table practice on the side. I recommend that you do those 10-minute drills at a different time during the day than her regular math lesson.