Teach Them How to Spell

I arrived in Nieu Bethesda on a Monday evening. After the first week of working with my kids, I returned to the tiny room in which I slept and sat on the floor until late at night - creating large, colorful signs representing each letter of the alphabet. I was determined to teach these children how to spell.

The students at the Sneeuwitjie (pronounced snee-you-vit-key) Creche ranged from age 3 to age 7. They could all recite the alphabet, but not one of them knew what the letter A looked like or that the word cat began with the letter C. As their newest teacher, I did not want to leave their small village in South Africa until they fully understood that letters come together to spell words.

So I made big flashcards - cards with A, E, J, X, and every other letter colored on them; cards with tires and playgrounds drawn on them; cards that could hang on the walls of the classroom for months and even years after I left. Every day we worked on three new letters after reviewing those that we had previously learned. I went around the classroom and helped each student form the letters on his or her piece of scrap paper, encouraging all of them to practice each letter that we had gone over up to that point. We chose corresponding words and pictures to go with each letter, words that these particular kids would understand. While working on writing the form of the letters, we also drew pictures to go along with them. A is for Apple; T is for Tire. We often used names of students to represent a letter: E is for Elfransou.

Eventually I watched Elfransou spell his name for the first time. I also watched Roderick do the same. And then others began to spell simple words such as cat or dog. Various words popped up on many desks throughout the classroom.

The daily progress throughout the entire classroom was quite clear. When we taught them the letters A, B, and C, hardly a peep was heard when we asked them to repeat the sounds back to us. By the time we reached S, T, and U, nearly every child could name every letter up to that point by sight. Not only did they name them, they shouted them with confidence and pride.

Of course some of the threesomes took more than one day to learn, and we consistently and patiently returned to the difficult letters until our kids were confident enough to move on. Some of the letters were hard to say while others were hard to write. I found that the patience we practiced was our greatest tool for properly and successfully teaching. The kids wanted to learn, and they were quite capable of learning all that we taught them and more. All they needed was our encouragement, our patience, and our slow and steady guidance.

When it was time for me to leave Sneeuwitjie, I looked at all of the children surrounding me - the children I had formed unexpected and unbreakable bonds with. It wasn't until that last day of observation that I actually recognized what had occurred: I had somehow managed to teach my kids to write letters, to relate sounds with pictures, and to spell words.