How to Teach Spelling Without a Curriculum

Find Spelling Words

The first goal is to find the spelling words you will use to teach spelling without a curriculum. These words can come from almost anywhere.

One of the best places to find spelling words is your child’s writing. Most kids misspell quite a few words. Use these words to create a list of spelling words for your child to study.

Another good place to find spelling words are phonics programs. Most phonics programs begin with simple 3-letter words such as ant, cat, and dog. There’s no reason you shouldn’t take your child through phonics again focusing on spelling this time around.

If your child is a stronger speller, consider using dictation to find spelling words your child needs to study. In this case, take a sentence or paragraph from a book your kid is reading. Dictate it to your child as they write the sentence on a sheet of paper. You’ll soon see all the spelling and grammar mistakes your kid is making.

You’ll have a list of spelling words.

How Many Spelling Words

Don’t overwhelm your child with spelling words. A first grader only needs 5 words to study each week. A second grader can usually handle 10, while older kids usually get 20 words a week.

Remember to be flexible. Kids aren’t the same. Some kids can whip out math sheets by the dozen but break down seeing 5 spelling words. Other kids will adore spelling and can’t get enough of it.

Use the recommended spelling words as a guideline, follow your instincts, and adjust to fit the needs of your child. After all, we’re homeschooling to give our kids a excellent personalized education!

Study the Words

Now comes the fun part. Let’s study the spelling words!

You can use the list of words to create word searches and crossword puzzles. Hand the lists to your child for them to create the word searches and crossword puzzles.

Pull out play dough, rice, and magnetic letters while you’re cooking dinner. Encourage your child carve the words in the play dough, trace the words into rice, or spell the words on the fridge with magnetic letters.

Call the words to your kid and order them to spell the words as loud as they can. Yelling is encouraged!

Have spelling bees where the kids line up and you call out each child’s spelling words. The child who can spell their entire list wins.

Pull out letter beads, so your child can make necklaces while practicing their spelling. Encourage your kids to make rainbow words with crayons.

Practice the spelling words in the house and out of the house. Spell in the dirt. For that matter, why not head to the beach and write in the sand!

Be imaginative and find creative ways to practice spelling such as these 10 ways to practice spelling words.

The advantage to teaching spelling without a curriculum is that you can personalize the spelling words to the ones your kids needs to study, the words they love to write, and the words they can’t spell.

And your kids won’t complain about a boring spelling curriculum.

Do you teach spelling without a curriculum?

The post How to Teach Spelling Without a Spelling Curriculum first appeared on True Aim.

1. Make words out of play dough.

Play dough provides a fun sensory experience, and a chance to really think about each letter before sculpting it!

2. Let them type

In our technology-driven world, typing is an important skill to have, and younger kids love to be part of it! Learn spelling words by typing them on the computer. The more often, the better; and the higher likelihood that they will stick!

3. Use magnetic trays

A popular budget-friendly trend includes using Dollar Store magnetic trays with magnetic alphabet letters. (or, you can hot glue magnets to ordinary letters) Jenae at I Can Teach My Child offers a great build-a-word magnetic tray tutorial!

4. LEGOs

LEGOs are a staple in nearly every American household. Use them to craft out spelling words!

5. Sing it!

You learned the alphabet to Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star, why not memorize sight words by song? This works especially well if you are switching up the lyrics to a well known song.

6. Get up and move!

Whether it be jumping jacks, hula hooping, bouncing a ball, jumping up and down, or running across the room – getting up and moving to different spelling words can help younger kids still be active in learning while releasing some energy!

7. Cheerios, beads, and other small objects

Spell different words with small objects, like Cheerios or beads. Creating letters provides a sensory experience on memorizing the different letter shapes.

8. Rainbow words

Grab a pack of crayons and write spelling words multiple times in different colors!

9. Shaving cream

Shaving cream is a favorite among early elementary teachers and parents alike – since it is relatively inexpensive, and has a soft, foam-y texture. Grab a bin, dump shaving cream inside, and let kids form letters with it!

10. Cut up magazines

Grab some old magazines (sometimes your local public library might let have old copies for free) and cut out individual letters, and paste them into your spelling words!

The post Top 10 Ways to Practice Spelling Words first appeared on True Aim.

I made up this simple game using (affiliate) letter beads and pipecleaners to work on letter recognition and spelling CVC words in remedial therapy lessons and the kids loved it!

Letter Beads Spelling Game

This activity is suitable for kindergartners and up. Adjust word difficulty according to the child’s age.

A plastic cutlery tray was used to keep the beads and our Letterland letter and word cards. Using material we already had made this activity a frugal learning tool.

First we used the letter cards: the cards were moved from the back to the front. The letter in front had to be searched for quickly and placed on your pipe cleaner. The person with the correct letter bead on the pipecleaner first, kept it. At the end, the person with the most letters, won! Simple as that, but the competition part of this simple activity made it more challenging!

After searching for bead letters, we moved onto the word cards. Here we only used CVC cards, but for older kids one can use longer words.

We played in the same way, but now one has to find all the letters AND place them in the correct order onto the pipecleaner, making it a little more challenging. Now the child needs to find all the correct letters (letter recognition), use segmenting skills for breaking up the word to know which letters to look for, find all the letters and use blending skills to put the word together on the pipe cleaner again. Segmenting and blending skills are crucial skills needed for reading, writing and spelling.

Both of these activities work on letter recognition, fine motor skills and hand eye coordination too. The competition aspect just makes it more fun when playing more than two people, but one can play individully.

Use this setup for practicing sight words and alphabetical ordering too!

More fun letter learning activities you have to see:

15+ Preschool Letter Activities
Learning Word Families using Magnetic ABC’s
Fun with Words

Check out our Learn to Read Curriculum!

The post Letter Beads: Recognition and Spelling Game first appeared on True Aim.

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Demme Learning. For more information read my full disclosure.

Spelling You See Homeschool Curriculum

I remember hating spelling in school. I don’t want my children to have that same experience. Spelling You See offers a different way. By combining handwriting, nursery rhymes, and spelling the program helps your child learn naturally. They remember how to spell sound combinations so they can put them together to make bigger words.

My favorite features about the program are the easy to remember rhymes that it has. This makes reading easier for my daughter, plus it helps teach her basic spelling principals like syllables and chunking.

The program comes with 2 workbooks and an instructor’s handbook. The workbooks are broken down into short lessons that take about 5-10 minutes each. Children learn best from short periods of learning time each day so this is the perfect amount for spelling. It also reinforces phonics concepts that my daughter is learning in her reading curriculum.

Another feature Spelling You See utilizes is the seek and find activity. It has children looking for certain aspects of the sentence with different colors to help reinforce the lesson. Almost all of the senses are used with this program as children write, seek and find, and say the words and sentences they are spelling, reading, and writing!

My daughter started with the Jack and Jill program. The first workbook was a little too easy for her in the beginning so we skipped to the middle of the book, which was perfect. It’s perfectly fine to give your children easier work at first, as this boosts their confidence and gets them used to using the curriculum.

As my daughter progresses through the program, she will naturally memorize different sound chunks; both vowel and consonant chunks. Not only will this help her spelling, but reading fluency as well.

Key Features of Spelling You See:

• no spelling lists
• no spelling tests
• no preparation
• free leveling guide
• 7 levels available
• brief daily activities
• engages visual, auditory, and kinesthetic processes
• long-term visual memory of letter patterns
• phonetic development
• affordability

Go to Spelling You See to read about all the great features, learn about placement or purchase a level.

Spelling Curriculum Giveaway!

One lucky reader will win their choice of one of the 7 levels of Spelling you See (up to $48 value)! Simply enter the Rafflecopter below.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

The post Spelling You See Homeschool Curriculum Review and Giveaway first appeared on True Aim.