Spelling for a Visual-Spatial Learner – AVKO Individualized Spelling

Since my son was in first grade we have used Evan-Moore’s Building Spelling Skills: Grade 1, Rod and Staff Spelling, Spelling City, and Sequential Spelling.  Evan-Moore Spelling was a simple way to start with spelling.  It is in the traditional spelling workbook format except it also has you learn to see the words by their shapes.  I really like Rod and Staff Spelling and felt that the phonics-based approach was a good thing for my son.  If you know anything about visual-spatial learners then you would realize that things like spelling and phonics are more difficult.  Because of my son’s weakness in phonics I thought a phonics-based approach would be good.  Although I stuck with this program for awhile, I didn’t see much results.  He kept misspelling the words he misspelled.  The phonics exercises were good though.   After going through some educational testing to give me more insight on this kid, a program like Sequential Spelling was recommended.  Sequential Spelling is a pattern-based program that helps your child learn to spell lots of words by learning the patterns.  We did Sequential Spelling through most of 3rd grade.  I did pretests and posttests for each sections, but didn’t see a great deal of improvement.  I also discovered that he ended up spending a lot of time spelling words he knew and he kept missing words he misspelled.

I knew I had to do something different and knew that something pattern-based was probably the best way for him, but wasn’t finding anything until I stumbled on Individualized Spelling by AVKO.  Individualized Spelling is a program with 265 lessons covering the 5000+ most important words to learn to spell.  The words are arranged in the order of difficulty.  It is by the makers of Sequential Spelling and basically uses the same method, but it allows you to customize the word families your child needs to spend time learning.  That sounded like it was just what I needed.  If you child misspells a word, it gives you the page number in Patterns of English Spelling to find more words in that pattern. I believe Individualized Spelling was designed to be used with dyslexic adults or adults who have lots of difficulty with spelling.  As a result, some of the model sentences have humor that only an adult would understand or use subject matter common to adults.  I haven’t really seen anything inappropriate for kids though.

If you purchase a membership on AVKO (about $20), you can get the Patterns of English Spelling e-book free and the Individualized Spelling e-book for $5, I believe.  Because they are e-books they are not consumable and can be used for additional kids at no extra cost.  Spelling City is also hooked up with the Individualized Spelling words, but I didn’t go that route because I had no success when I tried Spelling City combined with Sequential Spelling.  Here is a pdf link to a sample of Individualized Spelling.

I’ve been using Individualized Spelling for about 6 months now and I’m very impressed.  My son’s spelling has improved greatly.  I can’t say if it is this program, maturity, or a combination, but I plan to continue to use this until we have completed all 265 lessons.  I use it in a slightly different manner than what is recommended.  When we started my son tested into level B, but I quickly realized that he was misspelling some easier words so I backtracked to the beginning, collecting a list of words he had difficulty spelling.

Here is what we do:

1. I administer each lesson like a test (like Sequential Spelling).  Usually I administer 2 lessons at a time.
2. If my son misspells a word I have him write it correctly and then write it down on my list along with how he mispelled the word, the page number in Patterns of English Spelling, and the lesson number. 
3. Once we have about 6-10 words on the misspelled list, I have my son make an index card for each misspelled word.  One side he prints the word and on the other side he writes it in cursive. 
4. I quiz about 10 of the words for the misspelled list each time we do spelling.  I mark whether or not he spelled the word correctly.  See the – and l on my list under number 2 above.



5. If he gets a word consistently wrong we will look up the pattern and I’ll go over additional words with that spelling in Patterns of English Spelling.  This has rarely been necessary.