Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 8, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 March 1883 — Spelling and Composition. [ARTICLE]

Spelling and Composition.

Col. F. W. Parker, writing in the Minnesota Journal of Education, says: We give-to spelling so much of our important time! What is it? It is making the form of a word. That is spelling, per se. Oral spelling is the description of a word, naming its parts. A child can spell, i. e. learn the letters of a word, but might merely get it from sound. Spelling should be a description, as if I drew a house, which would be describing it. One of old Commenius’ principles is this: “Things that have to be done should be done by doing them.” The powers of the teacher seem to have been directed to doing a thing by doing something else. As soon as the child begins to read he spells. Oral spelling should be put off till the second year to make sure that he gets the form right. The first year should be given to copying words. Much teaching is merely attempted forcing out of the mind what has not yet got into it. Never spell any words for a child unless that child can follow with the idea, as the pencil traces the word. He thus learns the wrjtten and the spoken language together —learns to read and write at the same time. If all the spelling books were piled up and set on fire, they would give more fight to the world than they ever did to the school-room! The purpose of spelling is composition. In the first year provide the pupil with a correct copy of mental pictures. Give sentences, have the children copy them, and after they are erased have them reproduce them. Give the thought of what is spelled. The next year teach spelling by dictation. Train a child to know when he does not know a -word. He will then neyer spell wrong. All spelling can be taught in composition. Children can be made to love to talk with the pencil. A child knows a unit of thought by expressing it. Do an act and have them write it, or let them tell it orally. All of grammar can be taught in a beautiful way by action. Put no false syntax on the board; the wrong form is as likely to remain in the child’s mind as the right. Be right from the start. Pictures can be utilized in the writing of compositions. The little ones may write one, two or three sentences only about a picture, but by the second year the ch Id can write a story about it. In the third year it can write a page of composition entirely correct. Is that not a foundation for grammar? Another way of teaching composition is to tell the child stories, and have it reproduce them in its own words. In object teaching there is as much nonsense as in anything else. The fundamental mistake is that teachers attempt the impossible. They fail to understand that the child cannot see what they can see, and consequently talk above their heads.