I’m looking to find a more workbook driven spelling curriculum for my kids. We have been using All About Spelling and I love the way it explains the spelling rules, but my kids are acing the spelling when we are working on it but not spelling well outside of spelling time. Plus now that I have 3 Elementary age kids it is has become even harder for me to work one on one with them which means we do Spelling less often since we are using a Mom intensive curriculum. I need to scale back my involvement to giving tests and explaining topics here and there and increase the amount of independent practice my kids get. I checked out some Spelling curricula at Mardel and I thought the BJU Press looked good, but they only had Workbooks not Teacher Guides. Anyone who has done BJU Spelling or strongly considered it, do you need the Teacher’s Guide or can you figure it out from the workbook alone? How much teaching time is involved vs. independent practice? Is this a good program that effectively teaches spelling? Any other advice regarding it?
I haven’t used BJU Press Spelling, but thought I’d respond! I know some people do choose to move their kids who don’t have spelling struggles to something more independent after a few AAS levels, while others use it all the way through. Some also combine kids in a level to make it easier to teach multiple students.
Many children have trouble spelling in the context of their writing, especially if they don’t have a separate editing time. Often they are not ready to put all of the skills they have learned together in outside writing until closer to junior high. When students are writing outside of spelling time, they have many more things to focus on–content, creativity, organization, punctuation, spelling, grammar, capitalization, what kind of audience they are addressing–it’s a lot to think about at once.
So, students tend to need a lot of help with this no matter what you use. You might find this article on how to handle spelling mistakes helpful.
HTH as you decide how to proceed for your kids. I hope you find something that’s helpful and works well for your family.