Miranda has a new post up, detailing the learning that has occurred at her house this past week. For anyone who’s wondering if kids really learn anything without following a textbook plan, this will be enlightening.

As a side note, we’ve never done traditional spelling. Well, I take that back. We’ve done a little spelling, when the kids have used a workbook to fill in the blanks until their interest waned. Spelling tests and rote memorization were not part of our day. Mostly, we talked about how words sounded, or different spelling rules (and all the exceptions!). My feeling was that as avid readers, they’d come to recognize the way a word should look. And, I didn’t want them all hung up on how to spell a word, when they were trying to put a creative thought on paper.

There were some dicey years when I really questioned whether or not it would work. When Brad was young, if he didn’t know how to spell a word, his solution was to add the “magic e” to the end of it, which created some really interesting correspondence. His spelling has improved over the years, and it occurred to me the other day that two different things he wrote were completely error free. It’s a different way of learning, and in this case, substantially slower. He’d never have passed “tests” using this method. But he got here just the same.