Year in Review: Spelling

Spelling and Penmanship is a single class at K's 2 day school. This was a difficult placement because it combined K's greatest strength with her greatest weakness. At the placement test, K was really between 3rd and 4th, but since she had never done the spelling program and didn't know cursive yet, we decided 3rd was safe. Mid-year, K asked to be moved up to 4th, and they let her. She was much happier there.

Anyway, the whole 1st-5th grade spelling program is built around Spell to Write and Read. I think it is a great program, but it is VERY complicated. If the teachers weren't doing the bulk of the instruction on the two school days, I probably wouldn't bother, since K has great spelling intuition. But if your child needs serious spelling instruction, this program is VERY thorough and based on rules and logic.

On the two school days, the teachers would explain spelling rules, then dictate spelling words (15-20 each day) to the kids, who would then take turns spelling the words and explaining which rules applied. The kids wrote the words in a special notebook and marked them with symbols to remember how the rules work. On homeschool days, we memorized rules with flashcards, practiced spelling the words, and did enrichment activities, like finding the Latin roots of words, or looking for synonyms, etc.

We went along with the homeschool plan for the first few months, but the flashcards got old, and K seemed to be able to spell all the words just fine without knowing each rule by heart, so we dropped that. The spelling practice was supposed to be done in writing, but that was tiresome with all the other handwriting K had to do. So we subscribed to espindle.org and I added K's assigned words to that so she could practice by typing. Espindle.org was really great. It's pretty cheap, and it remembers which words are missed and adds those back to your practice each session until you get them right 3 times in a row. I also like that it has pre-programmed words and it would automatically give those to K if she ran out of manually added words. It also shows a definition and a sentence for each word, so you can improve your vocabulary at the same time!

Next year, we will drop spelling at the 2 day school. K has completed 4th grade, and got the highest score on the final test. She actually got a score equivalent to the end of 5th grade, and nearly the end of the program. So there isn't much point in a spelling class next year. There is some talk of having a spelling bee prep class, for kids who have passed out of the program, but that means studying words for which K has no practical use, and I think she is too young to start doing something like that. If she wants to do spelling bees in a couple of years, we can reconsider.

So, we will just do espindle.org practice a couple of times a week with their preloaded lists. She likes spelling, and the typing practice is good, too :-)