Spelling Wisdom – studying ideas?

Maybe your student is more of an auditory learner as opposed to visual. What if he repeats the passage aloud to himself over and over. Or records it and plays it back?

We use it for copywork each week. In addition to that practice, I let my children choose which words they are concerned about getting right for additional study.We practice writing them over and over, we write them and hang them on the wall in front of their place at the table higher than eye level, we make up funny little stories about the letters in the word and she decorates the letters accordingly, and we repeat them over and over out loud letter by letter (per Dianne Craft’s methodds) until my struggling speller feels that she knows them and then we test. It has greatly improved my child’s confidence…we spend about a week per excerise.

Yes, my children end up memorizing the passage or at least recognizing it when it comes up in other places. It is a great thing to watch them make those connections.

I suppose they do memorize some, yes. But isn’t that part of spelling? If we did all reading and spelling by phonetic sounding out – wow! how tedious that would be. At some point we all memorize, but the decoding is there if we need it. Does that make sense?

sheraz ~ I love your suggestions. My 9yo is a terrible speller. We’ve used about 40 lessons from SW as Sonya teaches in her video. My daughter’s spelling is not improving, really at all. I know she is young and many things just take time, but I do see her self-confidence suffering since her littler sister is a natural reader and speller.

My question is how long do you take with one passage?

You should take as long per passage as is needed to be able to do it correctly.  Mistakes DURING dictation should be rare; most of the work should be done before.  I typically did two per week.  If you are taking longer than one per week, I’d back off down a level; the passages may be too difficult.  

We studied a passage daily until they were ready to dictate it.  I had one child who was not naturally a visual speller.  But good spellers ARE visual spellers.  So I simply trained him to do it.  Took a little more time, of course, but this is a foundational skill.  I worked on other ways to work on visual memory, like lining up picture cards, having him study them, then taking the cards and having him put them back.  We took “snapshots” of things around us, then he closed his eyes and told me what was there.  We played that silly shower game where you put a bunch of items on a cookie sheet, let him study it, covered it up and he had to list as many as he could.  We played Concentration.  As he got better at his visual memory, we focused on the words.  What do they look like?  I often printed one up in a big font.  Having trouble with “broccoli”?  You could try to memorize the made-up rules that the phonetics folks insist exist (even though we only made them up after the spelling became standardized) and you’ll forever have trouble with which letter is doubled.  If you look at the word and think of all the rounded letters, just like the little nubs on broccoli, with only two “stems” sticking up–well, you can spell it when you are 90 in the nursing home.  “Accommodating” is another problem word.  Well, we know from Latin that it is “ad” plus “com” plus “modus”; and knowing the rules for combining words in Latin, well, of course you would make the “d” into another “c” and there are two “m’s” for “com” and “modus”.  Well, so we’ll never spell it wrong!  Once you’ve done something like this with all the problem words, ,THEN you are ready to do the dictation and the chances should be small there will be a mistake.

@erin.kate – The length of time depends on the child. This particular one aims for one a week, but we have taken two before…I am teaching my child, not the curriculum. I have another who would try for three a week, but goes too fast and makes careless mistakes, so I hold her to 1-2 per week since we are looking for quality.

We just started these ideas a few weeks ago with my struggling speller, and since they are helping with the SW passages, I am going to find a couple of lists of commonly used words by 1st grade or something and review them using the new ideas. It should help her “see” the words in a new light….and correct a few misspelled words. 

I have decided that this year we need to be less family oriented in our studies to a degree…they are using each other as a crutch if I am not careful. I have been letting them work on it at the same time (doing their own passage), but have a similar situation with the feelings. Ugh – it makes me feel so out of balance, but it needs to happen.