Spelling Power vs AAS

[moonlight]

I feel like AAS is not happening as consistently as it should be because of me! :-(

 

Tell me a little bit about Spelling Power vs. AAS.  Please.

[MrsWeasley]

How far are you in AAS?

[RKWAcademy]

bumping because I'm interested, too.

[amyc78]

I feel the same way with AAS! Why is it so hard to implement?? We switched to Phonetic Zoo after AAS 3 bc it just wasn't getting done, but I still prefer the way AAS teaches.

[moonlight]

We are a bit more than halfway through the first book. 

[moonlight]

Anyone??

[EKT]

I've never tried Spelling Power, so I can't speak to that, but we LOVE AAS! (We tried Spelling Workout in the past and found it to be pretty useless....) I find AAS to be very open-and-go, so maybe you're having trouble implementing it because you're trying to do too much during each session? Here's what helps me:

 

- Keep everything in one place, right next to your homeschool table. (We keep the card box and the book and everything all together, so it's all ready to go.) 

 

- I bought the 2' x 3' magnetic white board they recommend. It's mounted to the wall and the letter tiles stay up there all the time, so there's no time spent hunting around for letters. (This made a HUGE difference; when we first started, I didn't have a white board. I kept the letter tiles in a baggie and got them out for each lesson, working on the table top. That process quickly drove me insane, though, so we went ahead and got the white board and the lessons work SO MUCH better now!) 

 

-That said, we don't always use the letter tiles if my kids clearly have a concept down. When we want to move more quickly (and, say, just do a quick review at the beginning of the lesson) I just let my daughters write the words directly on the white board with red or blue dry erase markers. (Red for vowels, blue for consonants.) 

 

-I don't try to get through an entire Step each lesson! We do spelling for 20 minutes (roughly) each school day. We get through whatever we can get through in 20 minutes and call it good for that day. I place a little sticky flag in the teacher book wherever we left off, and pick up there again next time. (We have moved through very quickly in this manner!) 

 

So, I'd suggest just doing it little-by-little, so you make steady progress. Hang in there! For us, it has been so worth it. 

[greenbeanmama]

I was struggling with AAS for awhile, not consistently getting it done. It always seemed intimidating, opening to a new lesson, since I realky do take it as open-and-go. Once I realized I was sort of dreading spelling, I took a different approach. I figured we would just review for awhile, to establish the routine. We do spelling four times per week. On Mon/Wed we go through yellow cards; on Tues/Thurs we go through red. Blue are done daily; and for green, we review one "digit" daily (1, 11, 21, one day; next day 2, 12, 22, 32, etc).

 

Once the review routine was established, we ventured into moving forward with new lessons. All new teaching is done in one day. The new green cards are reviewed daily for the rest of the lesson. After the day of new teaching, we take however many days it takes to go through everything else. The additional words are divided up, so my children write about 10 per day (on a hand-held dry erase board - it made it easier to fix mistakes). Since there are 12 dictation sentences, that gets divided into two days, with review done each day. At the moment, my third grader is finishing one lesson per week, and my first grader is moving a little more slowly. But both of them are doing very well and retaining almost everything. Once we move on from a lesson, they hardly ever spell those words wrong.

 

Another thing that has helped is coming up with crazy stories that work the phrases or sentences in. My daughter, especially, giggles throughout her spelling lesson because of the wacky stories that she gets to write part of. Laughing during spelling is definitely a win!