Third in an occasional series of posts about the curricula we use. Previously: Latin, math, nature study.
When I was a kid, we got a spelling list every Monday, took a pre-test on Wednesday, did sentence dictation on Thursday, and had a spelling test on Friday. In third and fourth grade we also had frequent spelling bees, boys against the girls, which I loved. There was always a spelling workbook, of which I remember nothing. There was no way to learn the words except practice and memorization.
I didn’t know there was any other way to teach spelling.
I’ve written a bit about Alex’s spelling lessons before. We use All About Spelling, an intensively phonics-based curriculum in which students are introduced, one by one, to the seventy-odd phonograms (combinations of letters that represent sounds) in the English language, and then to rules which govern their use to spell words.
We do spelling four days a week. Each time, I set a timer for 20 minutes. The AAS books are divided into “steps,” which, in the beginning, could often be completed in one 20-minute lesson. Now it’s not unusual for a step to take us most of the week. That’s one odd thing about AAS – the steps aren’t single lessons, and the books don’t correspond to years. Alex started AAS 1 in June, and right now we’re halfway through AAS 3. That’s not an unusual rate of progress. (It’s also not unusual to slow down dramatically, as we now have.)
We always start lessons at the white board:
These color-coded tiles are the heart of the AAS program. We started with just a single alphabet, vowels colored red and consonants colored blue, and worked our way up to this dizzying confetti of tiles: “consonant teams,” “vowel teams,” different ways of spelling the sound of /er/, suffixes, syllable types. Alex can explain all of them, too. Each time she gets a new tile she learns all the sounds that letter combination can make; for example, oo makes the sounds in school, book, and door, and ai is “two-letter-A-that-we-may-not-use-at-the-end-of-English-words.”
Each step of the program focuses on a different spelling rule or pattern. Right now we’re doing wh- words, and before this we were working on when you need to double the last consonant of a word before adding a suffix. We practice applying the rules and analyzing the spelling of different words by building words with letter tiles. For example, I might build the word “paddle” and ask Alex to divide it into syllables, explain why there are two d‘s instead of one, and tell why there is a silent E on the end. Sometimes there are other exercises. Level 3 introduced a “Silent E book,” in which Alex sorts words that end in silent E depending on what job it does in the word. (I didn’t have much of a phonics education, so I only ever knew about one thing silent E does.) Or she might be asked to do a word sort, like this one, where she practiced four different ways of spelling the long A sound:
Most steps have a list of ten words that apply the rule or pattern in question. The words are printed individually on index cards. If Alex spells them without difficulty, I file them in the “mastered words” section of my card file and she rarely sees them again. If she struggles, we keep reviewing them at the beginning of every step until they’re mastered. So each time she has a “spelling list,” it’s customized for her specific spelling issues.
A very popular feature of AAS at our house is the jail for “rule breaker” words:
Most of the cumulative review in AAS comes from sentence dictation. Kids start writing short phrases like “big dog” in level 1, and by level 3 Alex is writing sentences like “We have one box of priceless dishes” and “Whose toad is on the table?” Each step ends with a long list of dictation sentences. I’m not sure if you’re supposed to use them all – we never do. I give her a couple of sentences every day we do spelling.
AAS is a program with a lot of bells and whistles – cards and tiles and books and “word banks” and booklets and color coded everything. I have been very happy with it. As I’ve said before, Alex is a perfectionist who was extremely reluctant to write freely, and AAS gave her the tools to break words into their components and try out spellings. I don’t think I would bother with this program if I had a natural or confident speller. For many kids, this would be overkill.
I do think that AAS is a great choice for kids who respond well to rules and patterns, kids who aren’t great visual memorizers, reluctant writers (because you can do so much with tiles and with markers on the white board), and kids who lack confidence with spelling. AAS is also very good for kids who didn’t get much phonics instruction when they were learning to read, either because they were self-taught or because they learned via whole language methods. We never made it all the way through phonics because Alex’s reading took off so quickly, and although she’s an excellent reader now, sometimes her pronunciation is pretty strange. Through AAS, she can learn the rules she missed without feeling like she’s being asked to go backward.
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All About Spelling has been the breakthrough program for my daughter. I can’t say enough good things about it! Your description is absolutely accurate…….except in our house if I set the time M complains that it’s not enough AAS.
Thanks for such a thorough overview, both of the program itself and of how it works for you guys in real life! That’s the one I’m hoping to use, too, but I’m not sure when best to start. What age did Alex start it? Do you think that was the right age?
We use this as well and we’ve been very happy with it. The phonics based approach makes perfect sense. I love that I’m also learning phonics rules that I never knew, right along with my 6 year old!
. . . I should maybe get this for myself. It sounds like Alex’s understanding of how English spelling works currently far outstrips my own.
Basbusa’s Mama: Alex started at age 6, when she started first grade. I think that was about right. She could already read well at that point, but I don’t think that’s necessary – doing AAS alongside learning to read would strengthen and reinforce reading skills. I think the important thing to have down first is letter formation. Even if a lot of the writing can be done on the white board (which helps with writing stamina), they’re still asked to make a lot of letters, even in level 1.
Ian: all the tiles and the step-by-step lessons would be waaaay overkill for an adult who was curious about the rules and patterns. How to Teach Spelling supposedly covers the same rules in a single manual, or you can just Google “Orton-Gillingham” and see what comes up.
This has always sounded like an interesting curriculum to me, as someone with a linguistics background. The linguistic background also forces me to ask: is it suitable for variant English pronunciations or focussed on Northern US? Most notably, since you mentioned /er/, how would it work for a speaker without postvocalic /r/ sounds?
I should say: don’t bother putting a lot of work (ie more than a few minutes) into an answer, this is really largely idle curiosity.
Mary, I don’t know. How’s that for not bothering to put a lot of work into my answer?
It’s clearly meant to be an American curriculum, because it uses American spellings like “center” and “honor.” It does allow for regional differences in pronunciation, though; there are often teacher’s notes in the margin that say, “if your local accent does not differentiate between these sounds, then…”
For example, there’s a wide swath of the U.S. in which there is no distinction between the short e sound and the short i sound. Pen and pin sound exactly the same. Her advice is generally to explain to the child that “when we’re talking, we say it that way, but when we pronounce for spelling we say it this way.” Similarly, most Americans will turn the vowel in an unaccented syllable into a schwa sound, but when we “pronounce for spelling” we are supposed to say all the vowels very precisely. And I’m finding our current lesson on wh- words a bit difficult to dictate, because in my own accent there’s no difference between wh and w. When I “pronounce for spelling” for Alex, I have to exaggerate the distinction in a way that sounds kind of silly to me.
I do like that the program neatly sidesteps the question of which accent is “correct,” in favor of which pronunciation of a word will give you the most spelling guidance.
Thanks for the info!
The tendency to use schwa in unaccented syllables is also very prominent in Australian English, and for bonus points it’s what we often turn /er/ into as well (a “farm-/ə/” is one who farms, etc). I guess to an extent “pronouncing for spelling” could be learned even so, there’s a morpheme -/ə/ that is found as a suffix on some nominalisations (obviously not a word I’d inflict on a child), and the spelling pronunciationof that is /er/. (Also very useful to insert them when in the US, an Australia expat taught me how to do it. We don’t really notice that we don’t sound the ‘r’ much.)
This sounds very similar to a program I once taught. It didn’t have all the bells and whistles, but had the 70 phoneme cards. The idea was for the kids to memorise the cards and the variant sounds that went with each one. Then there would be spelling lists in which I would say the word and then show them with my hands how the phonemes were divided – so ‘would’ would have: 1 finger, 2 fingers together, 1 finger, 1 finger.
My fingers got very strong!
It always seemed to me that it would be a terrific tool for struggling readers, as they would know what sounds the phonemes should have and then have a better ability to figure out how the words should sound.
Ok.. we are having a hard time because she spells bigin for begin or magnit for magnet. Wh words are also hard. She spells hole for whole. Now, yes when I give her the words for spelling then I overemphasize how you say it. But then she cannot do it in her own writing. So how do you get them to do it???? Also, she cannot remember the rule breakers like until. Homophones are also a problem. I was hoping this would solve all of our problems. She is 10…
Hi Christine. Have you seen the video on the AAS site, Help for short E/short I confusion? It might give you some guidance.
I think it’s very common to have kids’ own writing lag behind what they can do in their spelling lessons. It sounds like you have a regional accent that complicates matters as well. Have you tried having her read aloud while “pronouncing for spelling?” That might help her become more aware of the actual phonemes in the words.
Also, when Alex writes for school, I have her read what she wrote slowly and out loud. She often catches mistakes then. I try to have her edit herself first, and then I point out any remaining mistakes. I’m trying to encourage the process of self-review.