our homeschool: spelling

This is our 4th year homeschooling and our 4th spelling curriculum that we've used. I think we've finally found the one that works for us. It's called Sequential Spelling. I really like the way spelling is taught. Rather than learning spelling by memorizing phonetic rules, spelling is learned in word families and word patterns. For instance in the early lessons the student learns how to spell 'be' and 'in', then they learn how to spell 'begin'. The next day the lesson includes the same words as the day before only with endings added to them. So now the student learns how to spelling 'inning'. By the end of the week he/she can easily spell the word 'beginning'. Elle loves this because she is learning how to spell big words! You can view the first eight lessons in book 1 here.

The other thing that I like is that each day is a test and that each word is spelled correctly by the teacher after the student has written it in their notebook. If the student made any spelling errors they are corrected right away. I think this works so much better than in the past when I've corrected their spelling after they've took the entire test and then tried to teach them the correct spelling.