Spelling - Rod and Staff with WRTR?

[EmilyGF]

I've spent 1.5 yrs doing WRTR and loved everything about it except the direct teacher time involved. I bought R&S workbooks and set DS7.5 free to do them alone and he loves them. (He often "sneaks in" extra lessons.)

 

I really really really like the direct teaching of WRTR.

 

What if I did this: review phonograms two days a week, then dictate and mark up the R&S words? The review/practice is already provided in the book, so I don't need to assign/correct other reviews. We'd hit the spelling rules with WRTR and hopefully the kids would see words as groups of phonograms. I'm not sure if once I did this much work I would be losing all the pluses of R&S.

 

Any comments welcomed, or other ideas about how to do spelling well. I have four children 7.5 and under.

 

Emily

[Ellie]

I've spent 1.5 yrs doing WRTR and loved everything about it except the direct teacher time involved. I bought R&S workbooks and set DS7.5 free to do them alone and he loves them. (He often "sneaks in" extra lessons.)

 

I really really really like the direct teaching of WRTR.

 

What if I did this: review phonograms two days a week, then dictate and mark up the R&S words? The review/practice is already provided in the book, so I don't need to assign/correct other reviews. We'd hit the spelling rules with WRTR and hopefully the kids would see words as groups of phonograms. I'm not sure if once I did this much work I would be losing all the pluses of R&S.

 

Any comments welcomed, or other ideas about how to do spelling well. I have four children 7.5 and under.

 

Emily

JMHO: You either do Spalding, or you do Spelling by Sound and Structure.

 

My vote would be to do one more year of Spalding, wherein your ds also does the spelling notebook (with the rule pages, you know), then let him do Spelling by Sound and Structure beginning with the fourth grade book.

 

The Spalding Method is more than just marking the words, or reviewing the phonograms or spelling rules. It's the whole method: writing the words in the Extended Ayres List from dictation, analyzing each word, learning the rules in context with the increasingly difficult EAL words, and so on. Marking the words in the SSS word lists won't be the same. Applying the rules won't be the same. You would, in fact, be losing all the plusses of Spalding, not SSS.

 

Once your dc have done Spalding through third grade (which is when they begin doing a spelling notebook), then they could do SSS with its instruction and practice in dictionary skills, writing sentences with each meaning of each word (I think they start that in sixth), and so on.

 

And there are some things in SSS that might make y'all crazy, as when the days of the week are taught, and R&S says it's ok to pronounce "day" as "dee," because that's how people improperly pronounce it. ::glare:: Spalding teaches/encourages us to have precise speech, not to revert to lazy pronuncations.

 

Again, JMHO. :-)

 

This reminds me of a friend who complained for a couple of years that she was doing Spalding but her children's spelling scores were not improving on the annual standardized tests. I finally questioned her about what it was, exactly, that she was doing; turned out that she wasn't doing Spalding; she was taking the words from a spelling book and having her children do the markings and so on, as you're thinking about doing. The following year she actually did Spalding, and her children's spelling scores showed a marked improvement.

[EmilyGF]

You pinpoint my love/hate relationship with WRTR. It is so well designed, with the list that constantly bombards the kid with new words, but the time involved is so much from mom. You have a good point about writing the own notebook in third grade.

 

BTW, while I was using Spalding, I thought DS was a "natural speller" but it just turned out he was seeing words as phonograms, so his spelling fell off a cliff when we stopped. The free-fall has stopped, but implementing Spalding with my brood has been difficult. If I know I won't have four kids in it one time, though, I may be able to make it work!

 

Maybe I could rotate word-problem and direct math instruction days with Spalding, so that my direct teaching time is decreased.

 

It is funny, because I won't think of handing my kids a math text and saying "go for it!" but I would consider that with spelling.

 

Just a bit of thinking "aloud."

 

Thanks, Ellie.

 

Emily

[Ellie]

You pinpoint my love/hate relationship with WRTR. It is so well designed, with the list that constantly bombards the kid with new words, but the time involved is so much from mom. You have a good point about writing the own notebook in third grade.

Well, Spalding doesn't "bombard the kid with new words;" it is teaching the dc how to analyze words, and the Extended Ayres LIst is made up of the "most-often occurring" words.

 

But yes, Spalding is very teacher intensive. I understand your dilemma. :-)

 

BTW, while I was using Spalding, I thought DS was a "natural speller" but it just turned out he was seeing words as phonograms, so his spelling fell off a cliff when we stopped. The free-fall has stopped, but implementing Spalding with my brood has been difficult. If I know I won't have four kids in it one time, though, I may be able to make it work!

Your ds is young; I would expect his spelling to fall off a cliff when you stopped doing Spalding. :-)

 

Maybe I could rotate word-problem and direct math instruction days with Spalding, so that my direct teaching time is decreased.

Again, it isn't the direct-teaching that makes the difference; it is the Spalding Method itself that makes a difference.

 

It is funny, because I won't think of handing my kids a math text and saying "go for it!" but I would consider that with spelling.

Some things lend themselves better to independent work than others. :-)

 

Milions of people in the world learn to spell (and read) well without Spalding. If you want to drop Spalding and go with Spelling by Sound and Structure, then do it. I'm sure your dc will be fine. :-) Just pick one or t'other, instead of trying to blend them somehow. You will NOT see the same results as doing Spalding, and you will be investing lots of brain power in trying to figure things out. Just do SSS. :-)

[SFM]

:bigear: I have just begun reading/re-reading the Spalding method with WRTR manual. I am excited to begin implementing. I am listening in because I can see using R&S in the upper grades perhaps after WRTR. Not sure, Ellie is so knowledgeable and I really appreciate her advice on this subject.

 

One of my concerns has been that it does look teacher intensive but like you said I do it for math and if I am expecting things to progress in Spelling/Language development then I should be just as willing to put in that same intensity towards that subject. It's just tiring at times. :) Listening and let us know how it goes.

[Heidi]

I started with Phonics Road, then went to R&S spelling for the same reason. PR was just too time consuming to do with each kid individually. (PR is similar to WRTR; it holds your hand a lot more). Kids loved R&S spelling, but I thought it was busy work. In R&S spelling, the word lists are easy, but the value supposedly lies in the application of the spelling rules to the word lists.

 

So I took that idea and applied it to Spell to Write and Read's Wise Guide (word lists), but you could use the Ayers list in WRTR. Instead of having the girls in separate levels, I started them both on my dd7's level (youngest school age daughter).

 

First we review our phonogram flashcards. Then I dictate the day's words (20 of them) and they take turns writing them on the white board and mark them (apply the spelling and phonics rules). For instance, the first word I dictate to dd8, she writes it on the board, marks it, and we discuss (or sing, via Phonics Road since the spelling rules were set to song) the spelling rule that applies. She sits down. I dictate the next work to dd7, etc.

 

After we do all 20 words, they get out a piece of paper. I dictate two sentences to them that have one or more of their new spelling words in them. Then they take a test on a previous list of words from a few weeks ago that I also dictate to them. We don't do notebooks and we don't write out spelling rules and such.

 

We do spelling as a family twice a week. I have found this method to be very effective.