Kareem with Shadi, his kind brother

Kareem with Shadi, his kind brother

Sunday 8 April 2018

I can spell more than a 100 words



“I can spell 100 words”, said Kareem proudly. Spelling has become his latest game. Thankfully we passed the stage of persuading Kareem to spell “is”, “and” when he would rather watch TV or play with iPad. Actually, he has been learning a lot through special TV programmes (the amazing Mr. Tumble) and the iPad but that is for another blog.

Kareem used to go to this sport of the kitchen floor and play games on his IPad
Of course, learning to spell has taken a lot of time and efforts from the school, the family and from Kareem himself. I remember in 2015, we used little coloured words to get him to visually recognise common words. I played the words with him almost every day for long time. We had a big jar of various words and we would put a limited number of common words in a smaller jar and use it day after day. Gradually we would add more words to the small jar until one day we were using all the words from the big jar.


 

  
Recently, Kareem’ mum invented a way of making writing and spelling visual. She would draw a little table for the letters of a particular word then he writes the letters in the squares. Afterwards, he would write it down the whole word. Somehow, he liked this way of learning. Clearly visual learning is his thing.

For example:

T
h
A
t
That

After days and days of doing few simple words -almost- every evening, he started to decide the words, make the table but not use it for writing! Instead he would write the word first then do a table but the cells did not correspond to the number of letters!

Of course, it was not easy to get him to sit down and do “homework”. We use different method like: what do you want to do first? Invariably it is “watch Pippa Pig”. Then the negotiation starts on which homework first-usually after one Pippa Pig.  He decides between English, maths, science, spelling. We do not name these subjects as he now knows them. He also decides whether the work is from books, sheets, computer.

With the writing, Kareem would spell and thus the game started. Almost every day he would verbally spell few words until he reached a hundred words.

Yesterday Kareem was proud to tell his aunt the words he was able to spell. He would say: “I can spell….” and then he spelt the word correctly. Then his aunt would ask him to spell other words. At last, she asked him to spell: “cat”. He said: ta, aa, c. We must have looked baffled. He looked at us and said: “spell back”. Then he liked the new game and started to spell backwards other words: dog, quarter, mummy, dad, Kareem.

Today with friends he spelt backwards lots of the words he knows: school, children, where, when, what, book,…

I cannot describe the happiness of all the family especially his mother with his spelling “forwards”. Now that with Kareem spelling so many words “backwards” we are in ecstasy!