spelling power

I have been using Spelling Power for about 6 months with a struggling speller. I felt it was a happy medium of the disconnected word lists of which CM disapproves, as it basically screens for words they don’t know how to spell and has them study only those words, as opposed to poring over entire random word lists. It has lists organized into 47 general spelling rules and is leveled. Some kids need different things, don’t feel bad if you have to try something else for a season. I’ve got 4 kids in my homeschool and only one really needs the reinforcement provided by Spelling Power. In my opinion, you can forego the box of cards and just use the same simple techniques each time. Usually just I have my son do jumping jacks or stairs in time with spelling the words he missed, along with looking them up in the dictionary. Sometimes I also create a sentence with the word in it and use it dictation-style. With my oldest, prepared dictation worked great, but with my second, he was struggling greatly in 7th grade trying to do the 5th grade level prepared dictation after just a handful of lessons in Spelling Wisdom. Hope this helps. (This child has an extremely difficult time memorizing things, was a late reader, and struggles to recite things, even songs, verbatim.)

I tried Spelling Power last year and it’s worked wonders on my (now 13 yo) son’s spelling errors. He seems to make far less mistakes and has even mentioned that because of doing it (just two times a week) he finds himself memorizing new words going through the ten steps out of habit. He said it’s annoying in a good way.

We’ve done dictation before this and I really wish I had these study tools to help him then.