Learning to spell can actually make sense
Posted in Reviews on September 26th, 2009 by Elaine | Permalink | Share/Save
Tags: avko, learn to spell, sequential spelling, spelling
I think a friend gave me this book. Thank you to her, because that’s vastly improved our homeschooling lives. No more complaining during spelling time. Our old spelling list was a list of random words.
The AVKO spelling book has lists of words that are related to each other and build on each other. So the first word on the list is a short word, and the later words on the list (some of them) contain the same ending. Themes within lists go on for days.
Here’s another cool thing: the instructions are that you correct the student right away when they make an error. How cool! They’re not going to write in incorrectly for weeks, only to find out on a quiz that they had it wrong.
It’s also nice and simple. There are word lists, do one a day. That’s it!
I really, really love this spelling book and highly recommend it to all homeschoolers, and also to kids in school who maybe need a different way to learn spelling.
September 26th, 2009 at 6:50 am
Here’s part of a review on amazon:
By Jean Anne Jenkins (Flint, MI United States)
“Not only is this book a description of Don McCabe’s early years, he also has some fascinating information about the “word families” approach to spelling and reading, made new through his own well-developed sequential spelling strategies!”
In the reviews, they mention that McCabe is dyslexic, how interesting that he came up with this wonderful system despite/because of being dyslexic.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:31 am
We haven’t been using this book for very long, but I think it’s absolutely great! The book has been put up for review, but there are also a companion workbook and DVD available, too. I decided to get the whole combo pack to try using the series, so I can speak a little to all products in the AVKO Spelling series. The main book is great. It has instructions all spelled (haha) out for anyone needing a little better understanding of how to use the spelling lists. Some of the words are a little silly, such as “chinning” as a word in the first week of lists. But my son gets that the point is to practice two n’s making the i short. Plus, because the word lists aren’t randomly grouped together (or introduced only because they appear in a curriculum that you may not be using) he also naturally picked up on the fact that other words generally follow the rules of the words on his AVKO Spelling lists.
Now about the companion workbook and DVD.
I really like the companion workbook, though I can see it being a waste of money if your budget doesn’t allow for extras. I have nearly 5,000,000 sheets of loose paper floating around any of the ten areas that usually get used for homeschooling. So the fact that this workbook is specially devoted to AVKO Spelling is great for us. It has numbered columns for each day and they’re laid out so that the student would have to turn pages to see other days’ spelling lists. This helps my son not look to other days for help so he has to pull from memory.
The DVD is pretty much useless for our family. I not only caught my son cheating (obviously not the DVD’s fault), but it’s just plain unnecessary. The student plays the days lesson, after the word is given and a sentence is given as an example, the word is repeated and the student has to pause the DVD before the correct spelling is shown on the screen and then spelled out. My first grader could rarely get the DVD paused in time before the word was shown on the screen. So before he got the chance to try spelling the word, he had seen it spelled. He could have been doing this on purpose, which would be a problem with using the DVD in itself, but- in his defense, the sequence does progress rather quickly.