Kids

I volunteered several hours in Danielle's class yesterday and I was able to observe one of the teaching technique the school uses called "Hear it, break it, write it" What they are suppose to do is to write the word as it sounds so for example, the teacher will say Music and some kids would spell it muzik or mewsik. They are not graded by how many they are able to spell correctly. It's more of an exercise so kids learn phonics. Most of the words were not new to Danielle so she spelled them correctly but the exercise showed me that the English language isn't phonetically friendly.
Here are some of the variations the kids came up with

1. Human: Hoomen
2. Fuel: veul
3. Cute: qute

One kid in class cried when she found out she spelled most of her words incorrectly and said that she didn't like making mistakes. I explained to her that we all make mistakes and that is part of being human. She didn't really get my silly joke and continued to cry. She said that her mom felt sad when she mades mistakes and she didn't want to make her mom sad.

After that exercise, I quized half of the class on their spelling and most of the kids got stumped by the word "Enough" They tried to sound it out and spelled "Enogh" or "Enugh". When it was Danielle's turn, I didn't know what to expect because we did not review the new list since president's day break and I've been working late the night before. She got stuck after the 2nd word and she was quite upset. I promised her that we'll study at least 15 words this week and I will quiz her again next week.

She also has to learn that making mistakes is part of learning.