Need a more challenging spelling curriculum or should I drop it?

[AdventuresinHomeschooling]

My son is a natural speller. We started off going through the McGuffey speller with a spelling bee each week, and when he mispelled ten words, that would be his list.

 

This year, we went with a workbook just for ease of use. The spelling bee was taking forever to get to ten words. And he would also beat himself up when he got a word wrong. Also, other than copying the words, there were not very fun activities we were doing. Last year, we looked for a spelling book that had the most challenging words and settled on Building Spelling Skills by Christian Liberty Press. We are on lesson 20, and there are maybe ten words in the whole book he didn't already know how to spell. I figure it is still good practice, but it has become busy work.

 

I looked at spelling workout and doing it a year ahead as SWB suggested, but it still looked pretty easy for him. He actually asked to do BSS again. They have some good words like election and some social studies words that will tie into our civics studies next year in the modern era.

 

Should I stick with it? He will be in 4th grade. Should I switch more over to just vocabulary? He reads for hours a day and is a natural speller. Occasionally, he mispronounces a big word he is read or gets tripped up. Should I maybe just go through the McGuffey Speller again and see what he doesn't know? Maybe the word list from Kathryn Stout?

 

If it makes any difference, we will be doing MCT next year and going through his vocabulary, if that doesn't work out for us for any reason, we will do vocabulary from classical roots instead of Caesar's English.

 

The workbooks are cheap and easy, and there is no harm, but is it really still necessary for a child who barely misspells words. Is there a challenging book somewhere that could build him up for something like a spelling bee that doesn't go through 3 more years of workbooks to do it?

[SkateLeft]

Both of my girls were natural spellers and I dropped spelling as a subject in 2nd and 3rd grade respectively. If they misspelled a word in their writing, we talked about it, but there was no need to continue with a formal spelling program. Instead, we shifted focus to vocabulary development with word roots via Latin.

 

if you really want to continue with spelling, I'd look into Spelling Power. It's not a workbook, but the word lists go through high school level.

[amsunshine]

You could get him a Word Club pass on the Scripps Spelling Bee website each year.  The passes are inexpensive (about $25) and you can renew each August.  Scripps has all 450 new list words each year for grades 1-8 and there are both spelling and vocabulary exercises for those words.  Once the student masters the list words, he/she goes on to the Spell-it list, which has approximately 1200 words, divided by language of origin, and there are both spelling and vocabulary exercises for those.

[Critterfixer]

My two have been very responsive to picking their own spelling words from the selections we are reading as part of our writing program. We define the words, use them in sentences and we copy them. I encourage them to pick words that they don't quite understand and ones that they think they would use in writing. They are in fifth grade and last weeks list included for one child: depressed, vengeance, mocking, conduct, axe, mantelpiece, sparrow, eluded, succeeded, destroying, struggled and escaped. The other child chose: depressed, plotting, vengeance, sparrow, mocking, seized, creature, succeeded, furniture, however, certainly and fashion.

I do this because the boys retain spelling better from this exercise than workbooks, and because it's just more interesting to use the words in sentences of your own making. But if your child likes to read he could start selecting some of his own words to enjoy. I have no clue whether this would be decent Spelling Bee practice or not, but it might make a change from workbooks for a while.

[Ellie]

How does he do with syllabication? etymologies? adding prefixes and suffixes? using words in context (e.g., words such as "bureau" which have more than one completely different meaning)? Those kinds of things are taught in Spelling by Sound and Structure.

[AdventuresinHomeschooling]

He does fine with syllabication, using words in context, adding prefixes and suffixes, etc. He has a strong phonics foundation. He often correctly spells words he has never even heard when I quiz him. I just orally tested through 6 lessons with one error...he added an e in forlorn to make it forelorn.

 

I think I may just skip level 4 and do level 5 since he is interested in that book. It has lots of countries, scientific terms and geography, etc. He knows all the diphthongs and lists organized by such. We will then be moving into Caesars English. I like the idea of keeping a section in his language arts book for trouble words he encounters in his reading. Then I could have periodic spelling bees at home with a good list. I am not trying to enroll him in spelling bees unless he wants to. I did well in them as a child and enjoyed them, but if he doesn't, that is fine. I just thought spelling bee resources might be more challenging. But if I recall, it is just a large list of words when I did it.

 

Thanks for the feedback.