Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check

Flashback to September 2005: B's first week in Year One

Found a sheet of paper stuffed in B's bookbag. It was a list of words under a heading which said: "Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check." Baffled, I asked his teacher, Miss N, whatever it was for.

"Oh, Mrs A," Miss N said to me. "You just do EXACTLY as it says, one word at a time. He looks at each word, says it aloud, you cover it-- just fold the paper over, like this-- then he writes it down on the square beside it, then you check it against the original. Takes 5 minutes tops. I assure you, it's a hundred percent guaranteed way of teaching children their spellin's."

SPELLIN'S, indeed, I thought.

So every single evening, for the past 7.5 months, B and I have been doing his "spellin's" religiously, practicing five words a week, to be tested on them each Friday. Children who get full marks get stickers the following week.

Sometimes, though, I'd find it sooooo tiresome, having to do it everyday. How long those first "five-minute sessions" took! Five minutes, hah! Fifteen, more like. And that was on top of homework! How I dearly wanted to squeeze Miss N's neck for adding to my already-full daily schedule. What tedium! What monotony! The same five words everyday for the whole week. When I could be doing something else completely, something way less boring, like finish my Harry Potter book. I admit that sometimes I'd try to weasel my way out of it. What's the use?, I'd secretly think. They're just SPELLIN'S anyway. But B would never let me off the hook. And then, abashed at my own sneaky laziness, so unbecoming in a so-called grown-up, especially in the face of such consistent craving to do the "spellin's," I'd sit down beside him and help him through it.

Sometimes I'd catch B trying to peek at the covered word when he gets stumped, and if it were early in the week, I'd let him have another look, but I always warned him, "No cheating; just ask me if it's all right to have another look." Sometimes, he'd get distracted while writing a word down and ask me, "What was I writing again?" I'd give him a hint (e.g. "It's something you use for eating") and he'd get it.

Then I noticed that B wasn't just memorising the words he spelled but he actually read them (by sounding out each letter) and learnt the meanings, using the words in sentences before writing them down, and I was very glad to see his vocabulary growing so quickly. And the five minutes whizzed by more quickly than I imagined.

Fast forward to 2006:

At a recent parent consultation meeting, Miss N spoke with us about how consistently B has been getting full marks on his "spellin's" each week, and we could tell that she was really impressed. She wondered if they were getting to be "too dead-easy" for B and asked us, "Would it be all right if we give him 10 words to spell, instead of 5?"

I didn't want to push B harder than we ought, but I didn't want him getting bored, too, so we said we'll leave it up to him. I told B about it and he practically clapped his hands with excitement. So, okay, 10 spellin's it is.

Last week, they gave him his first set of 10 words, and Friday being the last day of term, they stuck the stickers on the children on the very same day.

B's sticker read: "Wow! I got 10/10 in my spelling test today!!"

And to think that at this exact time last year, with all his fine-motor skills delays and his difficulty getting his fingers in a proper tripod grasp, B could not even hold a pencil properly, let alone write, draw, colour, spell his own name or take written end-of-term tests in preschool. His handwriting was weak, spidery and ill-controlled. It was painful to watch him struggle, since it used to take forever for him to write his first name, and he complained that his fingers got tired too quickly.

Not anymore. His handwriting is strong, neat, legible and very well-formed, at times even better than some of his classmates' writing. Last 26th March, B wrote me a card for UK Mothering Sunday, and though the "spellin's" left something to be desired, the fact that my son is now finally able to put his thoughts and feelings on paper, to WRITE, overwhelmed me beyond imagination.

B's card said: "I luvn my Mam and dad and my bravo and day lavn me to -B"

(Translation: I love my Mum and dad and my brother and they love me, too -B... "Bravo" is how he says "brother" with his newly-acquired accent.)

So I guess B was right all along. The daily spellin's were worth it. The widened vocabulary, the lovely handwriting, the newly-found ability to write complete sentences and make his mum cry over a badly-spelt Mother's Day card.

Just five minutes a day has made a world of difference to B.