I've recently decided on a new approach to teaching Casia spelling. Up to this point, I had a weekly list that I would pretest her on, and then test again at the end of the week. In the meantime, she had to write sentences and could use www.spellcity.com to practice her words. I would group words together with a common theme, but I found that the lessons weren't sinking in and although she would have the words memorized at the end of the week, she wouldn't necessarily be able to spell them three weeks later.
I found this article by Linda Schrock Taylor which talks about 'the lost art' of spelling. She explains how it makes much more sense to learn the basic rules of spelling and all the basic phonograms instead of memorizing thousands of words. I'm a terrible speller myself (I like to blame that on genetics as my father was never much of a good speller either) so I'm as far from an expert on this as you can get. But I'm a big believer in the quote "If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always gotten." (Sorry, can't cite the source on this one.) So I'm prepared to change the way I'm teaching spelling in the hopes of getting different (better?) results.
In addition, since Garrett is in his early reading stage (Dr. Seuss, Henry & Mudge, etc.), this is the perfect time to start teaching these rules to him. It will help Casia spell and help Garrett read. To this end, I have just recruited Garrett to our Language Arts class every morning after breakfast. As I've been doing with Casia since the beginning of the school year, we start with a quote. Casia uses it to sharpen her listen skills and practice her cursive and now Garrett is copying it to practice his printing. After that, we do a spelling lesson. We just started it this week, so it's tough to tell how it's going, but I will be posting updates over the next couple of weeks. Maybe it will even improve my spelling!
(Fingers crossed that I didn't misspell anything in a post about spelling!!!)
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