PRIZES to win! PROMOTIONS
Wendy Talené grew up in a word-loving family. Her parents were missionary linguists stationed in a remote jungle village in Papua New Guinea. They analyzed a previously unwritten language, developed an alphabet and writing system, introduced literacy and translated a large portion of the Bible into the language. Words and linguistics were discussed and enjoyed in the family on a daily basis.She was eventually drawn toward linguistics herself and earned a BA in Applied Linguistics at Trinity Western University. Linguistics is like a playground for an analytical personality and she enjoyed the subject thoroughly. Near the completion of her degree and still trying to figure out how linguistics would figure into her life's work, she met her husband. After they got married, she worked at the Canada Institute of Linguistics until their first child was born.Life was all about tiny children for the next few years. Those who have raised small children know what a linguistically rich time this can be. It is a time of attunement between parent and child. All sorts of meaning is passing between human beings, verbally and nonverbally. A parent gets to see the subtle moments of sudden understanding on a child's face long before they can verbalize what they are thinking. Then they get to watch as language is acquired, a natural instinctive process that materializes differently in every child. During these preschool years, Wendy started a home-based business and wrote and illustrated a children's book, ""The Parable of the Field Mouse."" Attached at the hip to her two growing boys, she was constantly aware of their development, experiencing their moments of insight and broadening worldview along with them. Soon they reached school age and they inched their way into the adventure of homeschooling, still building on a foundation of attunement. One of Wendy's sons was a natural speller. He thrived in the world of words, read with comprehension and absorbed the spelling of words from reading. Her other son loved words as well and had a broad vocabulary but was the sort of person, like Wendy herself, that wasn't keen to learn something unless it meant something to him and he understood the reasoning behind it. Asking him to simply memorize the spelling of a list of words yielded no progress. The information would leave his brain almost as soon as it arrived. He needed to understand the system in which he was being asked to operate. Wendy searched for spelling curriculum with a rules-based approach. The resources she found lacked linguistic insight and offered rules with too many exceptions to be helpful. This book began as a sort of log of spelling patterns that were actually reliable and useful. Rules that failed were thrown out and new ones emerged as she dove deeper. Spelling With Understanding was born.
