Spelling grade 2

[Fwm23]

I am doing much of the 2nd, prek, and 4th new cores this fall and we have a baby. I am doing AAS with my oldest as he needs it. The 2nd grader has completed All about reading 1-4 and the Abeka Phonics and Language 2 workbook (has some phonics reinforcement lots of adding suffixes work and syllabacation practice) and is on lesson 21 of Rod and Staff Spelling 2. She seems to be an intuitive speller. She spells quite well on outside work and misses 0-1 in her spelling tests.

My question Since next year looks full, could I do Spelling Workout C instead or Traditional Spelling 2 with her? Or, could Traditional Spelling 2 be modified to be mostly independent?

[enbateau]

The TSII teacher-led activities are not presented in a way where a student could look in a book and just write the correct answer. In fact, many of the sample activities are started and the teacher is given creative reign to come up with more examples. That is not to say that I didn't prewrite the activities on the board and go work with her brother for a few minutes if she seemed confident and had it under control. The nice thing about MP is that the predictable format allows slightly more autonomy toward the middle of the year.

The first 3 days in the workbook could theoretically be very independent, but you're going to have to chime in on Dictation day (Thursday) and obviously for the test Friday. There are supplemental sheets for practice. FWIW, my MP2er needed lots of guidance with alphabetizing, syllabication, going from singular to plural, etc. I also set aside the Phonogram flashcards at the head of the week and flagged the pages in Classical Phonics for word lists to read. It didn't take long, but obviously I wanted to be nearby to know she was pronouncing them well. Spelling was my eldest's favorite part of the day, and it didn't take long. Your choice. SWO is....meh...fine. We did it this year and ordered it for next year. We're all hoping MP hurries up with TS3, but I hear it's a good 2 years off.

[jen1134]

My daughter tends to be a natural speller, but she still needed to build phonics awareness so she would have a better understanding of why words were spelled certain ways. We did the lesson together, but she did the workbook independently during the week, we rarely did the activities, and she usually aced her spelling tests.

I have another child, however, that needs all the activities, the supplemental workbook, the practice sheets, cumulative review, and extra multi-sensory practice. He can do the workbook and practice sheet assignments on his own, but the rest is at-elbow.

I would highly recommend TSII before SWO. For one thing, the SWO book used in 3rd grade has definitely thrown my natural speller for a loop on some of the word lists. Also, using TS first allowed us to then use SWO in a similar manner. I introduced the words, asked questions about their phonetic chunks, discussed contextual definitions, etc. just as in our TS days. Sometimes we even did some basic color-coding with them as in TS.

If I didn't have the TS background, I wouldn't have known how to do any of this. But with that background, it's now fairly effortless.

[MBentley]

I was late to the TS bandwagon. I've been using it for a few weeks and I'm very annoyed with myself for not starting it out the gate.

I have a total fail confession: ...I tried using this shiny "no word list" spelling program - Spelling-U-See - and if you have a kid who isn't a natural speller, this will do them no favors whatsoever. Now that I have TS2, and I can see what I've caused them to miss, I dumped the S-Y-S program for my older, natural speller student too in favor of SWO (he's in 3rd). Like Jennifer, I'm now taking the information from TS2 and applying it to the SWO.

The TS2 program is well done. TS3 will be awesome I'm sure - and since I have 2 more up and coming after these 2, I'm hopeful that I'll get to see it in time.