Spelling You See {Review}

Spelling You See is the newest addition to the well-known Math-U-See family. The spelling curriculum consists of five levels of learning. Each level has its own set of student workbooks and teacher handbooks. These are meant for elementary ages or maybe as remedial work for older students.

The five levels are: Listen and Write (level A), Jack and Jill (level B), Wild Tales (level C), Americana (level D) and American Spirit (Level E).

There are no grade levels assigned to each of the book sets but there are guidelines offered on the website. Julia (my fifth grader) is a very strong reader and adequate speller. Based on Spelling You See’s guidelines of being an established reader, we chose Level E, American Spirit. Our kit came with two workbooks (part one and two), a pack of erasable colored pencils and a smaller instructor’s handbook. The student pack is available on the Spelling You See website for $30.00 and the handbook is an additional $14.00.

There are 36 weekly lessons with five parts each. Each of the daily lessons involve two facing pages. The American Spirit level incorporates three main ideas: chunking, dictation and copywork. What is chunking, right? That’s what I wondered when I was first reading through the books. Some of the different chunks and patterns are: Vowel, Consonant, Bossy r, Tricky y Guy, Endings and Silent Letters. The idea of chunking is to help the student remember letter patterns to aid in them becoming a better speller, rather than memorizing lists of words for a week only to forget them in a short while. I will warn you, there is a high level of parent involvement with this curriculum. It is recommended in the instructor’s handbook that I read each lesson with her, every day. I will admit, I didn’t do it every day. We would do the first two lessons together and then she would do the other three for the week on her own. Of course, I did assist in reading the dictation for her on days four and five.

For each of the five daily lessons, the student (and teacher) read a short story about people from history. The child then goes back through the story and highlights or colors the different types of letter chunking and (on days one through three) then copies the story onto the facing page. On days four and five the teacher dictates the story to the student. The desired outcome being that the student has successfully remembered the new chunks and patterns introduced that week. The dictation should take no more than ten minutes to complete and if the first dictation is done easily and accurately then there is no need to do the next one on day five.

I really like that the instructor’s handbook has lesson-by-lesson instructions. It came in super handy with the ideas in these workbooks being so new to me. There is also a weekly activity guide, all 36 passages for dictation and of course an answer key for each of the student workbook pages.

What’s my take away? Well, this is a great curriculum for beginning/struggling spellers and readers. I believe their ideas of memorizing the chunks and patterns of letters are far superior to the age old tactic of memorizing spelling lists. In our Charlotte Mason style homeschool, we don’t do too much spelling work. The kids read a lot and between their dictation and copywork, I believe their spelling skills are getting plenty of work. Therefore, this isn’t something I would purchase for our homeschool but would definitely have a place in others.

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