Spelling advice please!

[Cindy in C-ville]

Hi Gals!

 

My rising ninth grader is VERY bright, but has terrible spelling. We've done SWO for years, but she's technically out of it now and obviously has not worked for her. I'd love for her to be able to do some type of online "Spelling Power" type of program. Is there anything like this out there? Or anything that you would recommend?

 

TIA!

Cindy

[Lori D.]

Can't rate this program highly enough. It has really helped my struggling speller. Megawords teaches the vowel patterns and syllabication rules to give students a method of "attack" in spelling longer words. Megawords is done mostly independently by the student.

 

 

Start with book 1 (even though it is fairly simple) for the spelling pattern rules and to get used to the program. If you do 2 pages a day, you will *easily* get through 2 workbooks in one year (and probably start into a third workbook). At that rate you would easily finish all 8 books by the end of highschool. While simple, Book 1 does have middle/high school level words; Book 2 is definitely more advanced; and by Book 3, you are definitely doing middle/high school level words throughout. The other great thing about Megawords is the exposure to and practice of great vocabulary words -- so you're getting spelling and some vocabulary at a middle school/high school level all in one!

 

And yes, get the teacher manuals; they provide the list of syllables for the occasional exercises which require you, the parent to dictate a list of syllables to the student for making complete words. You can figure out the syllables on your own by looking at the remaining syllables in conjunction with that unit's list of words, but it saves you 15 minutes of time by just having the TM. Also, answers to all exercises, plus teaching info are included in the TM.

 

For some sample pages (click on whichever level of book you're interested in, then click on the link under that book for the table of contents and sample pages):

http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books/easy_find?Ntk=keywords&Ntt=megawords&action=Search&N=0&Ne=0&event=ESRCN&nav_search=1&cms=1&Go.x=18&Go.y=15&Go=Go

 

 

BEST of luck with your struggling speller! Warmest regards, Lori D.

[lori in tx]

I would also look at Apples, there is two volumes of it. You can look at samples at CBD also. IT gives a spelling rules and then you are to apply it to words. There is no lists each week but rules instead. I am getting ready to use it with my 8th grader, megawords is real good also we have used it too.

hth

lori

[Lisa in TN]

Spelling Through Morphographs helped my ds. For the first time he said he could understand the reasons that words were spelled in certain ways, and he wondered why spelling wasn't taught this way from the beginning.

 

Before that, we had tried a lot of programs that didn't work for him.

[Susan in IL]

:iagree:

 

My once terrible speller (a product of ps invented spelling) is now a decent speller. We started in 7th with Spelling Power but that didn't work. We switched to Megawords in 8th and it really clicked with him. We went at a pretty good pace and finsihed all 8 books in 2 years (some summer work too).