by Debra Brinkman
Usborne Books

My oldest son just finished All About Spelling Level Two and will be starting Level Three next week. Though he has always excelled at math and science, he was a late talker, a late reader, and a lousy speller. We tried a variety of things for spelling, but I always felt like we were just playing with fun little puzzles, memorizing a couple words here and there—and not actually learning how to spell. And nothing we did ever carried over into his writing.

I did a lot of looking around and rejected most of what passes for spelling curriculum as more of the same—little lists, little patterns, cute little games...and little teaching. I checked The Writing Road to Reading out of the library again and though it was starting to make a bit of sense, I had no clue how to translate that into practice. And then I had some serious heart-to-heart conversations with a number of online friends about Spell to Write and Read and eventually decided that SWR was the answer—but I still had reservations.

Everyone I knew who loved and raved about SWR had either owned it for three or four years before finally figuring it out or had gone to live seminars that taught them how to use the program. Neither of those options looked good to me. My impression was that SWR was what my son needed, but it was going to be an incredibly steep learning curve for me and it was going to suck up a lot of time and energy.

Then a friend mentioned in passing that she had heard about something new, which brought me to the All About Spelling website. I read and re-read everything on the site, contacted Marie with questions to which she responded promptly, and then ordered Level One. I admit that I was skeptical at first. I was worried that it was going to be far too basic for my ten-year-old, but I figured I could use it for one of the next boys.

Once the materials arrived, I asked for my son’s help to learn this new program so that I would have an easier time of it with his younger brother. He consented and we started the very next day—I didn’t have to spend a week learning to use the program!

We raced through Level One. My son may not have added any new words to his (short) list of words he could spell, but he learned a lot and so did I. Both of us had already been pretty good at figuring out whether to use a c or a k to start a /k/ word, for example, but until we learned the actual spelling rules neither of us knew why we did what we did. We made sure to review all of the Key Cards, and I read all the notes to the teacher in there, too. He loved those!

We began Level Two as soon as it became available, and that is when I began to see progress. And the truly wonderful thing? I saw that what we were doing in spelling class was transferring over to the rest of my son’s life. He’d rarely make a spelling error related to the rules we had covered. 

Since finishing Level Two—and waiting anxiously for Level Three—my son has figured some things out on his own and has become more observant in his reading, so some words he now spells correctly because they “look right.” The improvement in his day-to-day writing has been pretty incredible, and though he still isn’t spelling as well as a fifth grader is supposed to, he is light years ahead of where he was eight months ago.

Notes on using All About Spelling with older learners

The AAS website has many great suggestions for using the program with older learners, such as providing them with a nice pen and journal to make writing more attractive. I’d love to see more suggestions! Here are some of the strategies I used with my ten-year-old son:

• I had him use the letter tiles, which forced him to actually figure out each sound one at a time.

• In many lessons, I kept reminding him that it was not just about spelling the word correctly, but about knowing why so that he could apply the concepts to other words.

• On many of the lists, I let him orally spell about half the words. Then we did the dictation. That is where he got his writing in, and he didn’t complain about doing that.

• When we got to Level Two, I wanted him to do a bit more with writing the words. I got a dry erase pen, and when it came time to write the spelling words, he’d go to a window and write them there. Then he’d start creating little crossword puzzle shapes out of his spelling words, which really got him writing and thinking the words through a lot more so that he could figure out where to fit them into his puzzle.

• The most important piece of advice I’d give to parents using All About Spelling is to make sure you aren’t completely skipping steps. Go through each lesson, do the examples, have the learner do at least a few of the words given for practice, and if he knows them, move on. I always tried to pull some of the more challenging examples to feel more certain. I did find that there were certain things in the Level One book that looked simple, but my son didn’t quite get. In those instances, we would do all of the examples.