My son is in Level 3 of All About Spelling.
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| You use a large magnetic board to hold the tiles. |
The tiles are strategically colour coded. The consonants (and consonant teams) are blue, the vowels (and vowel teams) are red and suffixes are pink. Vowel teams act as vowels whenever rules are involved.
My son is a gifted / learning disabled student, which means he has an IQ that is in the very superior range, and yet written out put (and spelling) that is in the average or slightly below average range. All About Spelling is a program that he excels at and really enjoys. He loves that he can succeed, and he loves that it is hands on. I love that it is well scripted, and that there is no prep time for me! The constant review means that what he learns sinks in and the results show in his work. I love to watch him while trying to spell a word, pause to think, and then carry on correctly. It makes my heart sing!!! It is proof that the rules in this program makes sense.
In level 3 we were introduced to suffixes. He has learned that there are two types of suffixes, vowel suffixes such as "ed", "ing" "y"** and consonant suffixes such as "ly". We learned a rule called the 1-1-1 rule. If the base word, has one syllable, one vowel, and one consonant at the end of it, then you use the 1-1-1 rule and you double the consonant before adding a vowel suffix.
1) "d" as in stayed
2) "t" as in mopped
3) "ed" as in twisted
He had to read and and then sort many words by putting them in the write column. I was thrilled that this was a lesson topic, because he did often spell words that are in passed tense with a "t" because that is the sound it makes. Now he understands that just because it sounds like a 't' at the end doesn't necessarily mean that it is spelled with a 't', and for him to stop and think, "is this a past tense word?"
At the end of our lesson, when he had to print out the 10 new words for today, he got to the word snowed. On his first attempt he started to put two "w"'s because the word snow, at first glance appears to follow the 1-1-1 rule. He stopped himself, and said out loud, "I've never seen a double "w" before. Then as I looked at the word I started to wonder if it was a "rule breaker" (the name that AAS assigns to certain words that don't follow the rules). After thinking about it, we both realized, that if we were to use the tiles to spell the word "snow" we would have used the vowel team for the "ow" and therefore not been tempted to put a double "w". He clearly knew how to spell snow- but just had think a little harder about why we would not use the 1-1-1 rule. The 'ow' in snow is actually a vowel team, where the two letters are working together to make the sound of "o" as seen below.
Today was another one of those days, where I am so thankful for such a well thought out and helpful educational program. I love that my spelling is improving along side my sons, and that I now have answers for questions about how to spell words or why we spell them the way we do.
THANK YOU All About Spelling!
**The letter 'y' has three different tiles: a blue one for when it acts as a consonant such as in the word yellow, a red one for when it acts as a vowel such as in the word 'dye' and a pink one for when it acts as a suffix such as in the word 'funny'.
