Accelerating All About Spelling

We will be finishing up level 2 of All About Spelling soon. The Kid is an early reader and a fairly good speller, but she wanted to be "taught" spelling. I chose All About Spelling because the letter tiles made it easy to adapt for a non-writer. However, we learned fairly quickly that the letter tiles are also s-l-o-w. I started having her spell the words aloud and then we moved to having her type out the words and sentences on the iPad. Sometimes we use the letter tiles for new teaching, sometimes I simply write on a whiteboard.

I discovered early on that the program starts out pretty simply. For some students, this may be a great confidence booster. For other students, this may create boredom. The Kid fell into the latter camp. We've accelerated the program in two ways.

Acceleration Option #1:
Complete only a portion of work from each lesson. We generally settled on all of the new teaching, 1/2 the main spelling words, none of the extra words, and 1-2 dictation sentences. Review was limited only to rules she had more difficulty with. We generally covered a full step in one lesson this way.

Acceleration Option #2:
Pretesting. I know that some people pretest using the full list of words for each step, but I wanted a quicker assessment. For each step, I choose 2-3 words from the main spelling lists that are great examples of the rule being taught. Pretesting 5 lessons at a time therefore has a list of 10-15 words. I do include ALL of the rule breakers that are covered in any lesson. If she gets the 2-3 words from a lesson correct, then we put a sticker on the progress chart for that lesson and we're done with it. If she gets any wrong from that lesson, we cover the lesson on another day. If a rule breaker is correct, we move on; if a rule breaker is incorrect I teach it along with any lesson coming up. We would cover a step in one lesson.

Here is an example of how Option #2 worked for us in practice:

1. Pretested steps 10-15 in Level 2. (Step 11 contained a word bank, but no new rules, so this covered five steps of new rules.)
          Pretest words: rule, June, size, rise, grapes, hoses, been, queen, deep, cold, child, her, super
2. Look over pretest. She missed grapes, hoses, been, super. These are from steps 12 and 15, plus one rule breaker. I went ahead and taught the rule breaker immediately. We marked steps 10, 11, 13, and 14 as completed on the progress chart.
3. The next week, we covered step 12. I taught the rule for pluralizing vowel-consonant-E words, then dictated three phrases and two sentences for her to spell.
4. Next lesson, we covered step 15. I covered the new teaching, dictated three phrases and two sentences.
5. Next lesson, we did a pretest for steps 16-20. Repeat as above.

Anyone else accelerated All About Spelling? How about with higher levels?