Spelling Wisdom or Spelling You See

I tried SYS (3rd grade and 1st grade). It was a good program but a few reasons I switched.

Had to write in print. We start cursive in Kinder and it was too much writing to write with SYS and then practice cursive too. It was doubling up, but I wanted to keep cursive practice.

The passages started getting long, and rewriting the same thing daily got repetitive. The higher levels have long selections and I could only imagine how tedious it would get writing the entire selection daily.

Dictating, even one word at a time, was not working for my kidos. It was almost like too much pressure.

(Add a note… my kids are not early readers. By the end of 1st doing better but not smoothly reading until 1/2 way or near the end of 2nd grade. Not sure if that played into the challenge of me dictating words, them not being able to vissualize the word in their mind to spell it?)

I switched to SW and have been happy. We start in 3rd using it as copy work and in 4th move to dictation. Tried dictation in 3rd with out success. The kids copy in cursive, don’t have to write it over every day (they like that). My DD (4th grade) has improved so much, especially the last half of the year using SW.

Both are good, but different methods and both with pros and cons 🙂