Poor Speller

Sometimes a child is a good reader but not a good speller because he is reading so quickly he doesn’t take the time to look at the words’ spellings as he reads. Prepared dictation can help establish that skill as a habit, because the first step in dictation is to read the passage and look for any words he doesn’t know how to spell. If he practices that skill every week, it should help over the long haul.

Using Language Well does not put emphasis on spelling rules because Charlotte didn’t. With all the exceptions to the rules in the English language, they can become more of a hindrance than a help.

That being said, if you think the rules are important to this child’s success, you could introduce applicable rules as you come across words in his dictation exercises that he needs to learn. If a particular rule will help him learn a particular word, go ahead and see if it helps.

Another option is Spelling You See.

I also agree with Sonya. We have down Spell to Write to Read in the past and I will tell you that it is not helpful to focus on all those rules. Sure they should be taught, but there are too many exceptions for them to be helpful in the area of spelling. My daughter has problems in this area. She started out with the very phonics and rule intense program and it did not create a good speller in her. She also LOVES to zoom through her reading. 😉 We are working on that 🙂 If she is forced to really look at those words she remembers how to spell them. I totally agree with Miss Mason that spelling is part phonetic but greatly memorization. I know it is not popular.

I am using spelling you see with my ten and seven year old this year and I love it. There are two books with each level, they have both finished the first book. It is copy work with dictation at the end of the week. It also revisits some phonics by having them color code the word in chunks. My ten year old is finding this especially helpful. When doing the dictation part she will remember that she marked a word in a particular color earlier in the week and she’s able to remember the spelling. I also like that it is an open and go program, it clearly tells you what you are to do each day on the page. They also focus on how many words the child got right rather than wrong. There is a placement test you can give the child to determine what level they are ready for.