Sequential Spelling

Since Princess barely made grade level in spelling we decided to look into some kind of program to help her.  Dude managed his above grade level with nothing more than a few pointers along the way and lots of reading.  He has a near photogenic memory, all he has to do for a word is think of where he has seen it and spell it that way.  Must be nice!

Princess is like me, she doesn't even spell a word in order, she throws some letters down than cries because she knows it isn't right, but has no clue how to fix it.  We have stressed sounds of letters broken words down by syllables and sound, and reviewed reading rules.  But nothing to serious.  I had hopes something would click eventually, and maybe it still will.

The tester suggested Phonetic Zoo.http://www.excellenceinwriting.com/catalog/4/spelling  We looked at the price, and checked some reviews.  It doesn't seem like a bad program, but the price is quite high.

In the meantime she wants to improve so we decided to try Sequential Spelling.  My mother uses it for one of her children with success and said it was fairly easy and simple to use, but helped her son learn a lot.

We are on day 5.  And so far so good. Dude and Little Man insisted they learn with Princess.  Which in the case of Dude is somewhat of an ego boost (like he needs one?)  Because he can spell quite well for his age.  In the case of Little Man it is actually quite useful.  He is learning right along with Princess.

The program teaches 'onesets' or word families, so you learn 'win' and 'sin' all with the 'in' then you add on to them, like 'winning', 'sinner'.  I am not quite sure why they put the be words with the in words, but whatever.  The two younger ones seem to know about the doubling the consonant rule now.

There are so many words each day, that while I do use it to help Little Man with his handwriting, I also let him take a break and spell out loud if he wants.


Colors are used in the program to help children see the different parts of the words that are the same and those that are different.  We happened to receive several boxes of crayons just this weekend so we are using most of them.  The children enjoyed picking which color to use for 'ch, th, and sh' and the like, as well as the 'base' color for the in.  If nothing else it makes the box of 24 crayons somewhat useful.

We shall see if this translates into any decent spelling on their other work!