I am a parent of 2 girls, age 6 and 11.5 months. So ask away.

I have just been a bit snarky today, I will give you smooches tomorrow.





Whos Line is it Anyway? I miss that show a bit.

Your statement confuses me as I can see several interpretations.

1) The two girls are presumably twins, both almost 7.
2) The two girls were born only 5 and half months apart
3) One girls is 6 years old. The other is almost 1 year old.

I'm guessing #2.

Smart-man is a playa'?

That's how I read it.

I should have known... bunch of smartasses. No wonder I hang out here.


I am a parent of 2 girls, one is 6 years of age and the other is 11.5 months.

Okay, it sounds like people are on board with getting "substancy" and, even though I feel really weird doing it in here, here goes.

As many of you know, I'm a tutor. I tutor two children, one in fifth and one in fourth grade. The boy is older and the girl is younger. I'm a general homework help kinda tutor at this point. I was brought in for different reasons for each child and those reasons have since resolved themselves for the most part and now I wait for feedback from parents or teachers to seek out an area of emphasis. Spelling, grammar, and general writing are areas that have needed emphasis at various times. I'd like to point out that I don't think the need has ever been the child(ren)'s fault. These have been failings of the environment in which they find themselves in "school".

We always spend some time reading and the children can, for the most part, pick whatever they want to read.

The younger girl arrived one day with Dav Pilkey's The Adventures of Ook and Gluk. This is the same author of Captain Underpants.

I've known of many parents who ban CU due to the "toilet humor" aspect, but that's not my concern, so let's try to leave that out.

I haven't checked yet to see if he does it in all his books, but things are constantly and consistently misspelled. They are done so in a way that makes the word sound right. At first, I was pointing these out to the child as we read and giving her the correct spelling on the board, but that was taking up so much time as to become contrary to comprehension.

But it got me thinking. Is this one of the reasons that they have had trouble with writing, grammar and spelling?

I'm not comfortable banning books. Yes, I tell children that any series with more than twelve books in it isn't literature; it's tripe. I hope that when I point out the simplicity and forumulaic content, they will see for themselves why stuff like Goosebumps is nigh-on worthless. But I've never said "You can't/shouldn't read that."

But Pilkey's stuff takes things a bit further.

I'm not considering banning because I just don't do that with anything. (Yes, Char, even Disney.) But should I actively discourage this as well? Is it worse for children than reading formulaic tripe?

What are your thoughts?

I strongly dislike writing in that style for young readers. Its effective enough for older readers who can appreciate the words' stylistic presentation yet still understand them as wrong. For kids who don't know the difference yet, it drives me crazy.

When I was going through my undergrad education courses, we watched a great NOVA type (IIRC) show that veered into mental scaffolding for kids up through their teen years. In the example, several students had "learned" fundamentally wrong ideas on science concepts in particular. Even when presented with factual information later down the road, they would default to what they'd learned and felt comfortable with early on. Trying to build on that incorrect base created more problems when trying to assimilate new, correct info. Other examples on this segment were science and government concepts that were based on parent or just ignorant teachers who would offhandedly explain something away without really knowing or understanding.

There may be some hardwired type differences between the examples I saw and the phonetic vs actual spellings you refer to, but I don't like it either way. Learn the correct way, then the luxury of playing around canbe afforded later on.

Just my 2 cents.

Can you give more information on the specific NOVA program?

you are still an archenemy. just wanted to throw that one in there before we forgot.

Damn straight. Can you convince these other goons that I'm not LPC?

This has been the most interesting page of posts. LPC isn't supposed to stand for this kind of substance!

DOWN WITH SUBSTANCE, MY LPC!

Methinks he doth protest too much.

I think that is totally wrong. You should get help.

LPC13, I think you bring up an interesting topic.

I am apparently a parent, with children in 12th, 10th, and 8th grade. In my household, TV is rarely on, and reading is a favorite pastime. Because of this, my kids always read at a very high level for their age. I was worried when I saw those problems in the CU books (my boys thought they were very, very funny). However, in our situation it wasn't a big deal because my kids read so much other material that they knew the words were spelled incorrectly.

So, from my point of view, if the majority of the books the child reads are the Pilkey style with misspellings, then that is a negative. If they are a minority of what the child reads, then it shouldn't be an issue.

If it's the former, then I suggest setting up a reward program. Perhaps the child must read 2 "normal" books before they can read 1 Pilkey book. Or, you find out all of the misspelled words ahead of time, and when they can pass a spelling test for those words, then they may read the book.

These may not be good ideas for some kids, because some kids don't like to read (an alien concept to me). Since anything is better than nothing, it may do more harm than good to restrict the books that they love.