Susie-Q&A

I love our spelling curriculum.  Really love it.  The concept is eminently sensible:  teach spelling rules implicitly by word families.  Brilliant!

However, I’m finding the implementation a bit tricky.

The main issue is the difference in my students’ ages and abilities, and the inability (unwillingness?) of my younger ones to tolerate prolonged writing sessions.

I have three students in the first Sequential Spelling book.  I started all on the same level (even though the oldest could probably move ahead a bit).  My idea was to quiz all three at once, and thus save time.

Save time.  Ha.

I find my youngest student lagging behind because writing the spelling word takes her longer.  We wait, and wait, and wait for her to finish writing.  While the boys wiggle around and make bored and disgruntled noises, I sit there practicing my deep breathing and trying not to allow the pressure to build up in my temples.  (Either that, or struggling to stay awake–depends on the day I’ve had.)

Given that her older brothers are what you might call reluctant students, I tend to lose them during long delays.   Mentally, yes–but physically sometimes as well.  For example, one will decide he needs a restroom break right about the time she puts the last flourish on the last letter, thus extending our delay that much longer.

In short, spelling is a grind.  It’s frustrating for them, and for me.  I find myself dreading it, and putting it off until it’s too late, and this program is no good unless used daily.  As much as I love this program’s concept, I need to tweak it a bit so we can get it done consistently.

Desperate, and unwilling to give up my wonderful Sequential Spelling, I have decided to revisit SpellingCity.com. This spelling site, used by many a homeschooler, allows children to test their spelling words online, play games based on their lists, print handwriting sheets, and so on.  Most of the features are free; a few (none that I need) require a premium membership.

I’ve entered the first few days’ quizzes, and now I’m trying to figure out how to make it work with this spelling program.

For one thing, Spelling City doesn’t recognize certain forms of the words on the list (though they have more than 40,000 in their database).  So, “Mr. Skinner,” for example, and “treed,” will not be tested.  This is not a huge deal, as AVKO instructs parents to shorten lists as necessary anyway.

However, one of my criteria for spelling this year was that spelling would double as handwriting practice, because coming up with copywork on a consistent basis has been a problem for me in the past.  Having noticed a downward trend toward sloppiness and illegibility in their penmanship last year, I gave each of these students a refresher course in D’Nealian at the beginning of the school year so we could be sure they were forming their letters correctly.   The idea was that they were to observe me writing the correct spellings on the whiteboard, then correct not only their spelling, but any letter may have formed incorrectly.

Well, taking the tests online obviously eliminates the handwriting element.  On the upside, it eliminates the prolonged writing sessions too, which are contrary to the stated goal of the program (AVKO recommends getting through the lists quickly).   And presumably it would add the element of consistency we need to get those implicit spelling rules into their brains.  It’s no good holding out for low-tech spelling sessions if that makes it less likely we’ll do spelling every day.  Better the daily practice.

SpellingCity will allow me to print a D’Nealian handwriting sheet for each list, but as AVKO’s Sequential Spelling lists are 25 words per day for most of the school year, that works out to two printed pages per child–lots of paper, lots of expensive ink…and, I anticipate, lots of unhappiness, just as there is now with the status quo.  SpellingCity’s printable lists are not, as far as I can see, editable.  In other words, I can’t select just a few words, like the ones the child misspelled, from the list for him to trace and/or copy.  It’s all or none.

If I want to have them write only the words they missed, and perhaps all the homophones noted on each list, I could do up my own handwriting sheets using StartWrite (or simply have them copy onto blank handwriting paper from the Sequential Spelling book after they complete their quiz).  This would cut down the frustration of having to write so many words, which, for my two younger students, is a large part of our difficulty in spelling.

Another issue is that all of my spelling students are beginning typists.  I can only trust that “hunting and pecking” for their spelling quizzes will not interfere with their progress on Typing Instructor.

I’d love to hear from parents who’ve used SpellingCity for students aged 7-10–especially those who may have used it with Sequential Spelling.  Anything I’m missing?

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 6th, 2011 at 2:11 am and is filed under Education, Homeschool for Free and You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.