One Room SchoolHouse Spiral Spelling/ HTTS with LOE

[Hunter]

I'm wondering if anyone has been successful at creating a one room schoolhouse style spelling plan where students of different levels were working on the same sounds/phonograms/rules, but with different level words.

 

I was looking at Ruginsky's How to Teach Spelling and thinking it might be possible. And that it might also be possible to base the lesson off of the week's bible memory lesson, done Ruth Beechick style.

 

There has been occasional talk of using LOE Essentials this way.

[Hunter]

When people have talked about using HTTS after LOE Essentials, did they mean retaining the LOE phonograms and using them with HTTS. The HTTS words are not marked, so LOE phonograms should work fine, right?

 

Did people mean using HTTS as an LOE supplement, reteaching the LOE chapters, or did they mean using HTTS as a stand alone curriculum?

[Hunter]

I had HTTS, LOE, Alpha-Phonics and The ABC's and All Their Tricks, all spread out last night.

 

I didn't realize how much HTTS focused on rules but not phonograms. There are no lessons at all for at least half the phonograms. There are no lists for ai, ay, oi, oy.

 

If I wanted to do this, with the resources I own, I'd have to use LOE as the main text, but it would take all 3 of the other books as supplements. That pretty much would defeat the purpose though. :lol: Except that stuff like this fascinates me.

[boscopup]

I tried using LOE Essentials with two children that were close enough to go the same pace... a 2nd grader that is just starting to have reading click, and a precocious K'er who reads and writes better, but is 5, so doesn't have stamina for a lot of work. I also, meanwhile, had a 5th grader using LOE at a much faster pace.

 

It ended up not being as easy as it looked. Someone was always needing to move faster or slower with something, and they weren't even consistent in who needed to move faster or slower.

 

Today, I split them up into separate programs completely. 2nd grader is back to R&S Reading and Phonics (which I really like for him - he isn't ready to learn all the sounds of each phonogram and then figure out which one to use. That was overwhelming him.), and the K'er is doing Wheeler's Speller at a slow pace, plus reading aloud from Free & Treadwell Primer to me. First lesson of the speller was copying an 8-line poem, so I had him copy 2 lines today, and we'll keep that up until he finishes the poem. I had him read the whole poem to me first, of course.

 

My 5th grader will continue with LOE. There was no need for him to go as slow as the little kids. We're doing the basic lists now, and then I plan to go back and do the advanced list. Or I might just switch him back to R&S Spelling at that point, for my own sanity (I'll have a baby to deal with, so less teacher intensive curricula is a good thing).

 

I'm sure a one room schoolhouse thing CAN be done with LOE or HTTS, though I think it'd be a lot easier with HTTS. I'm just not very good with one room schoolhouse type teaching, and my little ones who can theoretically be combined really do better in separate curricula (though each one asked to also do the other's curricula today :lol:). Teaching my 5th grader with either of the other two would be such a big gap, that I think it would be wasting time the 5th grader could spend more efficiently on other subjects.

 

I also keep going back and forth on intensive phonics. Any time I try it, my struggling reader gets completely confused. He does better introducing one sound of a phonogram at a time, plus using some sight words (which I explain how to sound out) to get him reading. His reading is taking off because he isn't stuck with basal readers. And he does better filling in the phonics holes later. My other two kids both taught themselves to read, so they both picked up on a lot of words by sight anyway, and have had phonics holes filled later. I have not been able to successfully get a child reading by just doing intensive phonics. And it might just be me. I don't know. I understand the phonics, but then sometimes it gets too much for me even, and I wonder if it's better for them to work out their own methods of remembering how to spell words and such (similar to how I figured out my own mental math methods instead of being taught them explicitly... My kids also do better figuring them out rather than being taught).

 

That's a bit of a tangent and a ramble (I'm good at that!), but I'm sure you would understand. :lol:

[Hunter]

I don't think I'm ready to let go of this idea, yet.

 

I'm wondering if the efficiency of doing this is actually equal to the efficiency of teaching the content subjects one-room schoolhouse style.

 

There are only 44/45 sounds in English. There are only so many spelling rules.

 

One-room school house style is not immediately efficient, but over time can be very efficient, if it does spiral through the topics over and over. When mastery is not obtained immediately, it is finally obtained over time.

 

I have found that topics need to be less cumulative if presented in a fast moving spiral. It's best if topics can stand alone.