Spelling "program" for 13-yr-old who wants to improve spelling

Great news about your son wanting – all own his own! – to improve spelling. Don’t you love days when you hear this?

I can’t say enough about Sequential Spelling. My eldest son started when he was 8.5 and is now 11 and still going strong. I could see it working perfectly well with a 13 year old though and Im not sure you'd need the adult version. I would imagine the adult version might move along more quickly ...if so, Id wonder whether the patterns will stickas well with your son. But definitely worth finding out! I`ll tell you about what I DO know, which is the regular version:</p>

<p>Regular version has 7 levels, so if he did 2 levels per year (assuming you school year round, or at least continue spelling during summer), he’d be finished the entire program by age 16-17. Id suggest you invest the in the DVD and do the dictation via the DVD...it makes this spelling program completely independent. We put the DVD into my laptop and have my son listen to the words dictated via headphones, so he is in a good place of concentration when hes doing it. The correct word spelling comes up on the screen after he has used the mouse to unpause the screen…it`s easy, easy, and yet it works!

The really important component, which seems small, but is really critical from my understanding, is that the student correct a misspelled word IMMEDIATELY after hes written it. Dont wait until the end and correct them all at the same time, as this is MUCH less effective in locking in the word patterns and prefix and suffix patterns.

So the deal is, using the DVD: hear a word dictated; press pause using the mouse; write the word in a notebook; press unease; see the correct spelling of the word come up on screen; press pause using mouse; study the word onscreen and compare it to how you spelled the word. If you made an error, cross out your attempt and re-write the correct spelling beside it; press unease and repeat the whole process. 20 words per lesson, takes about 15 minutes.

I have my son write on our homeschool checklist how many he got wrong, and if it was a big number (i.e. more than 4x), I will look at his notebook and have him write a few of the misspelled words in a sentence on our whiteboard, or, Ill just do a spot test orally. But, for the most part, its completely independent, because the program words so well that we have very few days where he gets more than 1x or 2x, and usually it`s 0x!

Good luck, hope this helps as something to consider.

Blessings, Angie