Almighty Dad | A stay at home dad blog

Several months ago I wanted to start teaching my kids to spell.  They know how to write, and they know how to read, but their spelling was pretty awful.  I decided to start picking out random categories of words to teach them to read.  For example, one day they would spell the days of the week, on another day the colors, holidays, types of cars – whatever.  I didn’t really know a different way of doing it.  Since kids are pretty smart and can overcome whatever stupid teaching method I devise, they admittedly didn’t do too badly.  Then along came a homeschooling friend of mine who patiently explained how I was doing it all wrong.  She suggested I try this Spelling Power book.  It was welcomed advice because I really was looking for a different approach anyway.  I just didn’t know what direction to go.  I’ve been using it now for about a month and some weeks.  And, Jeez, the book is great!  It’s somewhat pricey at $65, but it is a full spelling course.  By that I mean it takes students from 1st grade all the way through 12th grade.  Yeah, you never need another course.  Perfect.

Placement

Not all students start at the same level.  The book comes with several placement tests that you are supposed to administer to your child before embarking on the course.  It’s easy to give the placement test as the only requirement is that you stop the test when your kid misses three words in a row or 3 words very close together or 5 words total.  Then you take his score and follow the chart in the book to the section where he should begin.  Both of my kids started on A1 (the most basic level).  It gets so specific in it’s placement in fact that it gives a general grade level and then places them more specifically in 1/10th increments within that school year (6.5 or 2.3 – get it?).

15 Minutes a Day

That’s how long it takes.  That 15 minutes is divided up into 3 parts of 5 minutes each.  The first 5 minutes of each lesson is spent testing from the provided appropriate word list.  The testing is nothing more than saying the word, using it in a sentence and then saying the word again.  The student writes it down and you go on to the next word.  There are not that many words per day and you are to stop the test when your kid starts getting them consistently wrong.  That’s when you go to step two, studying misspelled words.  Spend the next 5 minutes spelling the words that were misspelled during the previous day’s test.  Every several lessons there are review tests for your student to go over older words.  The method also uses a special 10 step retention technique for students to learn their trouble words without the use of rote memorization.  It is much simpler than it seems and it really does only take 5 minutes to perform once the process is learned.  The final 5 minutes of class is spent playing games.  That’s pretty simple.  The book gives a list of word games and activities that reinforce learning.  It’s nice to finish up a lesson with a game.  The point is to end with a smile.  It works.

Worksheets and CD

The program requires the use of printed worksheets that you can download from their website and organize into a ringed binder.  It only needs to be done once per school year and it provides for greater organization along the way, as opposed to keeping track of everything in a spiral notebook.  The other nice tool it comes with, for the benefit of parents, is a handy CD ROM that is a quick start guide for parents.  It goes step by step how to do the lessons, basically it’s a lesson in how to teach for parents.  It’s just one way that we, parents, can feel more confident that we are doing the course in the way it was intended.

Like I said before, I’ve been using it for a little over a month, and it definitely works.  English is not a language where spelling comes naturally.  The romance languages are easy to spell, but English is not a romance language.  While English is a relatively easy language to learn to speak, it is probably the hardest language in the world to learn to spell.  Spelling is a huge part of learning English, and it’s not to be taken lightly.  I’ve always wondered how all those homeschooled kids ended up doing so well in the spelling bees.  Now I know.  It’s not because of the stellar teaching abilities of their parents.  It’s because there is a proven method that they use that produces impressive results.

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