Stepping into Spelling

Anna finished her phonics workbook at the end of last week, so now we are moving on to spelling, using Christian Liberty Press's Building Spelling Skills Book 1. I was not sure how good Anna's spelling skills already were, because she doesn't usually write anything without a model in front of her (except her own name), but she had been doing well with understanding the rules for adding "s", "ed" and "ing" appropriately in the last workbook. So I decided to test her through the spelling book until we got to a place where she can work with the right balance of challenge and confidence.

The first day we tried spelling I ran into a problem. Having not had much practise at writing without an example, Anna finds it very tiring to do so, even if she knows what letter she wants to write. So I decided, rather than exasperate her or give up on the spelling idea altogether, I would find a different way of doing spelling tests.

So I gave her an A4 sheet with the alphabet written on it. I say the word aloud and she sounds it out phonetically. Then she has to point to the letters which represent each sound in that particular word. I write down the letters she points to. Then I get her to check what I have written and tell me if she thinks it is right. if she does, we move on to the next word. If not, she tells me how to correct it and then we move on.

At the end of the word list, I go through it with her and tell her which words she spelt wrong. We use a red cross, green tick, yellow caution system. If the answer is wrong, I write a red cross, briefly explain where she got it wrong, rub out the wrong answer leaving a blank and write the correct spelling to the right. Then that word gets added to the list fro tomorrow's test. I figure once she starts missing too many, or not getting them right on the second go, we'll begin working through the curriculum properly from there. So far she has done fine on re-spelling every word the second time through.

If the word is correct, I give her a green tick "Go!" A yellow caution is issued if she got it right but had initially spelt it wrongly before her self-check caught the mistake. Yellow caution words get added to the next day's list.

Doing things this way has, in some ways, made things more teacher time intensive. But Anna isn't quite five (three weeks to go) so I don't mind helping her out any way I can! Not only that, but moving through things this way means that she is getting to know her alphabet a bit better (she is making less b/d reversals and self-correcting on these now). Also, by separating the act of spelling into the acts of identifying the phonemes and determining the graphemes for each phoneme, and not including the skill of writing the grapheme without a visual example, I am helping Anna to spell using her brain and not just her hands.

(Addition 4/4/9)
I forgot to mention that Anna does eventually write the words herself. Once we have checked them for spelling together, she traces over the list I have written from her instructions (and any of my corrections). This way, she is practising writing the words, but she is never actually writing them wrongly. Sometime soon we will probably change this from tracing the words to copying them, but not quite yet. She already does a lot of tracework - History is now up to six full lines (three extended sentences) - so an opportunity for copywork would not go astray.