Language and sensemaking

Jordan is figuring out spelling. School encourages him to do a mixture of carefully sounding out words and just guessing, which I think is great. Apparently we all read by letting our brains fill in the blanks anyway, so why not put that human skill to good use from the start? It's worth sacrificing some accuracy for speed, is my feeling, since if you forget the beginning of the word by the time you get to the end, you've kind of missed the point.

Sounding things out is not necessarily a reliable way to spell correctly, either. Of course there's the old line about "photi" - "ph" as in pharmacy, "o" as in women, "ti" as in nation. But Jordan has decided that dragon starts with a J. Go ahead, say it aloud: it DOES start with a "j" sound, at least the way I say it. Jragon. Am I wrong? And truck, according to Jordan, starts with "ch." This blows me away. I didn't hear a "ch" until he pointed it out to me, but once he did, it honestly seemed more reasonable to me than the alternative. I told him I was impressed with his accurate hearing (and for that matter, spelling), and pretty much left it at that. At some point he'll learn that truck starts with T and eight starts with E and all that.

Aaron, meanwhile, was talking on the phone with Grandma the other day, and she asked him what he was doing, and he said, "Talking on the phone with Grandma." Right. I was reminded of when Rosencrantz and Gildenstern asked Hamlet what he was reading and he said "Words, words, words." Or when Holden Caulfield, to the same question, answered "Goddamn book." Aaron wasn't being flippant, though. His answer made me realize how often we help him attend to and name what he's doing by saying things like "Aaron, are you drawing a fish?" when we already know the answer. Maybe it's time to back off on that.