I'm a Believer in Spelling Power

While spelling has always come easily for me, the same is not true of all my children. I had a grown up believing the theory that avid readers made good spellers. All my sisters were bookworms and had no trouble spelling. My parents devoured books and spelled well, even in foreign languages. I also believed good spelling was as genetic as curly hair or blue eyes. My parents could spell well, my sisters could spell well, and so I naturally assumed any offspring of mine would spell well.

Along came my firstborn who kept me thinking that at least part of my reasoning was correct. He was a biological child, had blue eyes, and spelled reasonably well. He disturbed the other part of my theory; he was not an avid reader nor wanted to become one. Give him a baseball, a bat, and a backyard and he was happy. (Backyard optional.) Ben--though he used some phonetic creativity in the first three or four years of school--soon began spelling almost everything passably well by fourth grade. Nothing atrocious. (Did I spell that right?) Nothing alarming. Nothing that made me incorporate spelling drills into my homeschool day. In fact, I secretly thought the mistakes were kind of cute and that he'd outgrow them soon enough.

Then along came Sarah. She shared my genes. My darling little girl who always had a book in one hand and a baby doll in the other. (Is it any wonder she has chosen Early Childhood Education as her major?) Sarah's second home has always been the local library. She would read books about animals, plants, children, families, colors, God, you name it. I have photos of her reading to Stephen on the sofa, their soft, little legs dangling just over the edge of cushions. How surprised I was, then, that her writing did not reflect all the correctly-spelled words she was reading. By fourth grade her inventions were anything but cute. I thought, "She'll never be a good elementary school teacher if she can't spell." I panicked. My daughter's future was so shaky, resting on pitifully strung-together letters she called werds. I mean words.

Nothing was wrong with my daughter. It was my theory about spelling that needed correcting.

That's when I went on an aggressive hunt to find a curriculum that would work. Memorizing lists was not helpful. Sure, she could ace any spelling test, but ask her two weeks later, and we were back to skwair one. Long-term retention was just not there. Giving her a bunch of rules didn't cure her. Scrapping 45 minutes of math in order to do 45 of spelling was torture (for both of us). I prayed more out of desperation than faith.

Enter Spelling Power. It was the talk of the homeschool town at the time. Not written by a Master of Spelling, but by a mom whose own daughter was flunking every test in school and was being emotionally affected by her failures. (Aren't we all?) She became a student of her daughter, pulled her out of school (if I'm remembering correctly) and began teaching her a new way of spelling. The results astounded everyone.

In a nutshell, here's what I remember being the keys to success with Spelling Power.

1) Fifteen minutes a day is all it takes--and all a kid CAN take mentally. Beyond that you get results inversely proportional to the amount of time spent studying words.

2) My way of doing the program worked fine. (I'm not patient about reading 30 pages of teacher helps in the intro. I plunge right in after getting the gist.) I am convinced you can tailor Spelling Power to your child's learning style and your teaching style.

3) You diagnose their level by finding a list they can easily master, and then move on.

4) The book doesn't say "Grade Whatever" on the cover, so no kid in 7th grade feels stupid seeing a big 4 on the front cover. Maybe the words he can master would by typical for a 4th grader, but most words in our everyday vocab are at about that level, so what's the big deal? The program can start with a very young reader and progress till at least 8th grade, I'd say.

5) The way I worked it with my kids was this: Pick a level a little below where I think they are competent. Have them spell the words orally until they start missing a few. Whatever they miss, they write down correctly with my help. When they miss 10, that's their weekly list. (If you think fewer than 10 is better, that's fine. Better a kid spell five words well than 10 poorly, right?)
They spell it by writing it, tracing it, closing their eyes and spelling aloud, and a couple other tricks of the educational trade. Come the next Friday, they are tested from their list. Get it right, it comes off their list. Miss it, and it's repeated the next week. So the list is THEIR own personal list, not some arbitrary one chosen by some nameless, faceless publisher doing a proper scope-and-sequence thingy.

6) Stick with it. If a kid hates to spell because of a mindset that "he can't" or because he'll be laughed at or put down or even hear his mother's exasperated sigh, he'll make up all kinds of excuses. He'll contract chicken pox from his pencil. He'll get hives from his ink pen. He'll come down with a sudden migraine, brought on by the mention of the word "spelling." Mom will feel similar symptoms. Don't buy into it. Stick with the plan. Poor spellers can become decent spellers. I am convinced. My Sarah is living proof. While she still occasionally asks, "How do you spell....?" it is not the norm.

My new theory is: good spelling is a visual thing. Look at a word spelled correctly, meditate on it, trace it, write it, spell it orally, write it again. All the top-notch spellers in the Scripps National Bee will "air write" on the back of their placards. Ever notice that? The word has to "look right" to a good speller.

Trust me on this one. Spelling Power cost me nearly fifty bucks (new) back in the day. It was worth every pene. I mean penny.

As a funny aside, when Joel was four he told me he could spell "cartoon." Really? I doubted him; he spent more time on the laptop than in books (to my shame and Sarah's horror). "Yeah," he announced. It's c-a-r-t-ENTER." (It always worked when he was trying to get to "Cartoon Network" online.)

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For more info (in marketingese, here's something I lifted from a website called Castlemoyer.com.

All New Design!
4^th Edition Spelling Power

This famous, award-winning spelling program by Beverly L. Adams-Gordon just became better. Now featuring 21^st century technology, it still teaches solid back-to-basic spelling skills. Since 1994, Spelling Power has given home educators the perfect way to teach comprehensive spelling skills to their whole family. (See What's New in Spelling Power.)

Your students will use this research proven program to master the 5,000 most frequently used words. These words are divided into 11 levels based on their usage. Each level of Spelling Power’s unique word list is then further organized by phonetic principles and spelling rules.

Additional words that your students needs to master are taken from your student’s own writing errors and added to your Spelling Power program using the provided resources. Your students continue to study each of these words until they have spelled them correctly at least once. Then Spelling Power’s i>spiral curriculum approach of repeated, spaced review assures your students will master every word they study. And your students will master them! Spelling Power’s six levels of built-in review guarantees that every word taught will be mastered.

Multi-sensory study steps, inductive learning activities, interesting skill-building activities and games, and the incorporation of spelling into the rest of your curriculum are integral aspects of Adams-Gordon’s Spelling Power program. Everything you need to teach each of your students spelling skills to the college level is contained in this one easy-to-use, step-by-step curriculum package. You’ll even find everything you need to know to teach them proofreading and dictionary skills.