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Spelling Wisdom Help
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I am having a hard time with spelling wisdom each week. My son age 11 6th grade is not getting the words right. He copied a lesson last week and I had him redo the lesson this week and he still got 4 words wrong. I have them copy the lesson 3 times and on day 4 we dictate. He is not a good speller at all, in fact today he asked me how to spell ‘much’? I was aghast! I am a super good speller and have a hard time being compassionate with some words he can’t spell. So, please share any strategies on how to improve this situation or how I implement SW in general. They are also supposed to copy the words they do not know 3 times each, I just found out he has not been doing that.
Have you watched the SW video that was recently posted in the SCM blog? It really helped me understand the process better.
Tristen has also posted in previous threads about how she uses SW. That also helped me a lot.
What we do is
Day 1 – copy the selection in best writing with no errors
Day 2 – select the new words, there should only be a few that are new to the student. I have my child write down those words and look for phonograms and different things that help them understand how to spell the new word.
Day 3 – ready for dictation. I “spot check” ask a few words for her to spell out loud to me before doing the dictation.
I do not have my student copy the passage over and over. I feel like that would get old fast and the attention would be lost so it would be copying thework but not thinking about how the words are spelled.
I was never a good speller, but I could spell outloud much better than on paper. My DD does that too. Often after dictation if she gets a word wrong I ask her to spell it out loud and she gets it. I think she writes faster than her brain 🙂 Also she does her copy work in cursive but dictation in print. Print makes her slow down to write so that helped.
My son does fine with dictation in SW. But my daughter does better with Sequential Spelling. There is a free sample lesson on their website for a week or two.
Does he like to read? Is he a good reader? Sometimes kids who don’t love reading really struggle with spelling simply because they haven’t been exposed to as many words. Maybe try taking a break for while and really bulk up his reading. When you re-visit the spelling in a few weeks or even months you may find that he is up to speed.
I’m thinking maybe skipping the dictation would be a better idea, and instead just focus on letting him seeing and writing the words every day (rather than having to do it from memory, where he’s more likely to make a mistake).
If all else fails, you may need to look at a more rules-based spelling program, where he can learn the rules that will help him. I find the SCM approach to spelling is better for those who are good at memorizing words. Some kids aren’t, and therefore, need the rules to help them.
My 4th grader was like that. Last year was her first year using SW (on top of a traditional spelling program) and her spelling did not improve at all. This year we continued using SW, doing it like you describe, but I had her mark vowel blends, consonant blends, and something else…I think it was blends where r changed the sound every time. This is what Spelling U See does (I looked at their samples to figure out what to have her mark). This made a HUGE difference in just one term. I still wouldn’t consider her a great speller, but she is much improved, and now when she learns a new word, she generally retains the correct spelling long-term, whereas before it seemed like the correct spelling just vanished out of her head within a week or two at most.
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