Spelling You See–A Review

If you’ve been following along our learning adventure – you’ll know that we have come to adore Demme Learning (Math U See and Spelling You See). We are visual learners. Last year we were able to try two levels of Spelling You See and liked the entire concept of it. My son learned quite a bit, even if the level of work was a bit below a 7th grade level.

Spelling You See has come out with two new levels and we were able to try Level G – Modern Milestones. This starts at a new stage of learning development. You can read about the stages on their website: Developmental Stages of Language. This is in the Word Extensions stage. The book assumes that you have a strong mental memory of many common / familiar words.

As a relaxed learner, Charlotte Mason Style, we enjoy how this program presents an alternate method of spelling. There are not any word lists or spelling tests. I don’t need to spend time reading of words. That is a good thing for me.

We are going to spend time reading about Modern Milestones, folks like Jan van Eyck, Johann Gutenberg, Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, Copernicus, Michelangelo, Miguel de Cervantes – and more. Each week a small bit about each person, with a new person each week.

There is a small paragraph to read aloud. Then the student looks for a list of words that can be found in the text. They will underline those words. Next, they will look for the suffixes, and then the prefixes. By lesson 11 they are also looking for Compound words as well.

Each section of the word gets marked has a different color. Root word in Blue. Suffix in Yellow. Prefix in Green. Demme Learning sent us Erasable Colored Pencils to help. One new step to this level is an activity page.

So – you have a week of lessons – A, B, C, D, E. Day one the teacher/parent helps you walk through the new paragraph. New Suffixes or prefixes are explained/defined. The words are given simply spoken to the student.

A B & C work on the same paragraph. Each lesson is two pages, the left hand side is the marking, and the right hand side is for copywork. As the week moves along, you’ll copywork a small portion of the paragraph. Each day the student is to read the passage aloud.

On C there is a Workshop Page. These have been fun – an immediate way for me to know if my son is ‘getting’ it. It also has helped him work on some reading comprehension/instructions. They have a few questions to help them work work with the word extensions. (If you look closely here, you’ll see he did not read the instructions, and he did not get all of the words correct. Ha.)

Lesson D and E have the student marking – and then writing the entire passage from dictation. On D, the reader gets to help, on E, the student needs to do it without hints. The focus is on how many words are spelled correctly. It is amazing, in 3-4 short days, how quickly and accurately the student can write out the entire piece.

The lessons come with a Teacher’s manual. It is handy, as the paragraphs are marked for you, so it is easy to scan to make sure you’ve seen them all. For this level, we have not used the teacher’s manual, but for the younger grades we relied on it.

On the younger levels, the student picks apart the word quite a bit more. Vowel combinations, phonograms, etc. each have a different color.

Yes, we do like how the visual memory is strengthened with the combination of copywork, reading, speaking, and listening!

I like that the curriculum comes in two workbooks –

For my son, this makes it less overwhelming than a big thick book. The cover is super soft, and the book is light weight, easy to throw in our beach backpack.

One thing I forgot to mention to my son this time, is that the lessons are intended to go week by week. That means that on Monday – start with A, every week. There is a lot of repetition, so you will not be missing things if you do 2-3 days per week. If you are a ‘page a day’ person, that is great. We are mostly a 3-4 days per week. We skip the From Dictation with Help. On weeks that we know we will be scrunched we skip B, which is mostly a repeat of A, we just read the opening paragraph. So we are just finishing up week 4 today.

For the marking – The only thing Jon doesn’t like is the colors. I let him switch to just a pen, underline, slashes, and circles. For me – especially with the phonogram books – the colors are a brilliant idea and really made how the words were put together POP.

A true indicator of how much we like a curriculum? How long we use it after the review period. We are required to use a product to the vendor’s specifications for 4-6 weeks. After that, we’ll choose another product, time it out, and sometimes pick up on the same academic topic with a different company. I just received our next package to consider, and yesterday told Jon that he didn’t ‘have’ to keep doing Spelling U See while we started the next one, and he disagreed with me. He wants to do them both together. He says it doesn’t take very much time and he is learning a lot. As long as he just gets to use one pen. Ha.

So, as you can guess, Spelling You See is a product that I have been recommending to friends – and will continue to recommend. There are tests on line on their site for placement. (Getting Started) I’d ask you to spend time looking around their website to see their philosophy and other resources as well.

You can plug into them with social media –

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SpellingYouSee
G+: https://plus.google.com/+SpellingYouSeePage/posts
Twitter: http://twitter.com/SpellingYouSee
Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/SpellingYouSee/

Jon is a bit older – but this is still a great product for him. Please click the banner below to read more reviews from the crew from folks with different levels.
This was Level G. There are 7 levels to browse.