I can't remember who suggested it, but THANK YOU!!! My girls are eating it up!! Sure is a lot better than trying to memorize a list of words with no relationship to each other.. Wish i would have found this sooner!!
I love the concept of it but it just did not work for dd. She just never caught on to the patterns. We started using Spelling Power (which has a similar approach) and that works for dd. Glad you found something you love!
Sequential Spelling was the first program we tried and it didn't work at all for us. My son constantly asked why words were spelled the way they are and his spelling never improved. I switched to something that taught spelling rules and saw a huge improvement. I guess we just have to find what works best for each child.
I do have to remind my youngest to look for the patterns but she's getting it.. We are only in the first book.. DD12 is ready for some challenge so I may skip it up a little for her..
I wouldn't just skip the first book entirely, though. Rather, skip to the harder days. The word lists have a tendancy to build in 4-day increments. Use only the 4th day words for each set, perhaps. Since the books aren't "graded", there is something that all students can & can't spell as a beginner or advanced student in all 7 books.
I have heard other people talking about Sequential spelling also. Glad to hear that it has been so successful. We have tried various spelling programs too - what is it about this one that you love so much. I am so tired of buying stuff and not using it? Thank you so much!
Make sure to visit their site as they have additional info there to use with the program. Last time I checked there, they included spelling rules and such.
momomany - SS isn't a graded curriculum (everyone starts on book 1, regardless of age or grade). It teaches kids (and adults) to recognize patterns so they can spell words they've never seen before. If you can spell "in", then you can also spell win, sin, pin, etc. If you can spell sin and pin, you can use clusters to spell spin. Using patterns, you'll naturally learn to double the n to add suffixes, so you can spell spinned, spinner, and spinning. The program teaches through trial and error. You don't learn an arbitrary list of unrelated words, and you don't have a test once per week. You learn words that are all related by testing daily. Correcting your own mistakes, you find patterns and are thus able to spell complex words. If you know that "no" has a homophone of "know", and you know how to spell ledge (because you've learned the "-dge" words), then it would be no problem at all for a child of any age to spell "acknowledgement", even though they've never seen the word before, and to other children it would look daunting. My 7 year old likes to joke with people that he can spell the longest word in the English language... because he actually can. (It's antidisestablishmentarianism, by the way ... which is a very simple word if you break it down to its root of "establish".) SS builds confidence and takes away the "I can't spell that because I'm only in ___ grade" barrier or the "I'm so stupid that I have to use a ___ grade level spelling book" barrier. Grade doesn't matter.
I'm a reluctant user. I much prefer Rod and Staff spelling, but my son's examiner recommended an approach similar to Sequential Spelling. I find it soooo boring that I would avoid doing it when I used it years ago. I've done a bit better with my younger son, but I wasn't seeing great results. He was practicing lots of words he knew and there wasn't enough practice for the patterns he missed. I couldn't really skip ahead because the words he tended to miss were the more basic patterns. I think I've found a way to use it so it would work for us. I'm using the Individualized Spelling through AVKO which has you go through the patterns and only work on the ones missed. I use it in combination with the AVKO Patterns of English Spelling. So far, so good.
You can also get the adult version of SS. We went through that a couple of years ago. It doesn't cover the tricky or foreign words you'd find in books 6 & 7, but it covers the regular patterns at an accelerated pace (2 yrs vs. 5 yrs). Another thing we do is skip around. I only ask the words that I think will trip him up (speaking of my older... my younger is hearing impaired and doesn't use SS). If he gets the word right, I move on. If he gets it wrong, I drill the words in that family. We usually cover 1-3 pages per day rather than just one list per day.
