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Spelling Wisdom few questions
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I’m sure this has been posted somewhere in the past, but as I sit here and school plan I need to clarify some things. I’m about to go crazy…I know you all have been there.
We started Spelling Wisdom Book 1 half way through 4th grade, when my oldest turned 10 (to the best of my memory). He is getting ready to start 6th grade and we are still in book one around lesson 56 (obviously it’s taken us awhile to trudge through this). I see that he should be halfway through book 2; however, I also see that towards the end of book 1 the lessons get fairly lengthy. In the past I had him study the passage and when he was ready we would dictate.
Questions:
Do I need to just keep going at our own pace or skip to book 2?
How is it that a child can study a passage that is half a page long in a day and be ready to dictate on day 2? I’ve seem somewhere today that dictation is a couple times a week, but some of these passages are super long. I expect quite a bit of resistance from him in expecting he know the punctuation and spelling in one day.
How do you all keep track of/review spelling words that the child didn’t know? So far, I have just kept a running list in a notebook and periodically reviewed several orally once a week or so. There is no rhyme or reason to this method, just a way to review words that needed practice.
I appreciate your insight and feedback.
I am in no way an expert, just learning along as we use SW 🙂
Each exercise should only have a few new words that actually need to be studied, so even if longer passage most words should be known. My oldest was working on 2nd half of book 1 last year and some did get long so I would not dictate entire selection if I knew it would take too long. Some kids are quick writers but my DD needs to slow down to do dictation well (or she writes too fast and errors on words she knows).
I don’t record error words for future review. They somehow seem to come up at some point and practiced again. I also find that after a dictation exercise if I ask her to spell the word aloud to me she can, she just got going to quickly while writing. We are working on the slowing down and checking work.
As for moving on. Look at the samples and see where your child fits. If he is ready for book 2.
I would say to go at your child’s pace and not worry about completing a book in a set amount of time. We have gone slowly and are seeing improvement now. I can’t remember when we began SW, but we are at lesson 95, I think, and she is 6th grade. Two dictation exercises in one week were just too much for her. So we do one a week, using the passage for cursive copywork and grammar as well. She reads and writes very well and this struggle with spelling really surprised me. I think she reads/writes so fast that she doesn’t always notice the spellings of words. So slowing down has helped.
My kids didn’t make it all the way to the halfway point of their SW books last year. We’re just going to pick up where we left off.
I really like this way of doing spelling–it’s so much more meaningful and I don’t think, if our kids are reading good books and being read to from good books, that we really need to worry a whole lot about spelling or vocabulary or punctuation skills.
Some people seem to struggle with spelling more than others but I think for the most part it will all work out. Maybe I am too relaxed about it. 🙂 I worry about other things, ha.With long passages, you have the student study and prepare the whole selection using whatever tools are useful. Then you dictate only a portion.
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