Review of Spelling You See
Revolutionary Way to “Teach” Spelling
I have a brand new product to share with you and review today. Welcome to Spelling You See, a revolutionary way to “teach” spelling!
I have been using Math-U-See for years and love it, so I jumped on the chance to review Spelling You See.
It comes in 5 levels, and we reviewed Spelling You See: American Spirit (Level E),
as well as Spelling You See: Americana (Level D).
The other 5 levels that are available are:
- Spelling You See: Listen and Write (Level A)
- Spelling You See: Jack and Jill (Level B)
- Spelling You See: Wild Tales (Level C)
- Spelling You See: Ancient Achievements (Level F)
- Spelling You See: Modern Milestones (Level G)
What’s different about Spelling You See?
Well, there are no word lists, no studying a set of words for the week, and no Friday spelling tests! This won me over immediately. I have another spelling curriculum that’s been sitting on my desk since August. And 2 of my kids have “spelling” on their weekly assignment sheets, but we haven’t done ANY spelling this year until we started Spelling You See. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Why is Spelling You See better?
Here’s how it works. The child is working on a paragraph each week, not a set of words. The “spelling words” are embedded in the paragraph, so they are learning how to spell them within a context so it’s really building their visual memory. They work on the same paragraph each day of the week. Here are the activities to do each day, which takes 20 minutes or less.
1. Teacher reads the paragraph to the student
2. Student and teacher read paragraph together slowly, pointing or looking closely at each word.
3. Chunking: The child marks the consonant chunks, vowel chunks, Bossy r chunks, etc. with a specific color in the paragraph. (The answers are in the Teacher book.)
4. Page 2 has a place for the child to write. They do copywork for the first 3 days (copying part of the paragraph and stopping after 10 minutes of writing if it takes that long). It never took 10 minutes for any of my kids to write it.
5. Do chunking on their copywork.
6. The last 2 days of the week, the child does dictation of the paragraph instead of copywork. The teacher (mom) dictates the paragraph to the child. On Day 4 the teacher will watch and make corrections as they go through. On Day 5 the student will just do their best to spell everything correctly without asking for help. If the child does everything perfectly on Day 4, they don’t need to do it on Day 5.
What else do I love about Spelling You See?
Both Levels D and E have paragraphs about American history! In Level E the kids learn about great Americans such as Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, Helen Keller, and Thomas Edison. I’ve always loved incorporating copywork and dictation in our homeschool–it’s a Charlotte Mason technique. But we’ve gotten away from both lately. So, I’m glad to be doing it again.
Both of my sons who tried it really liked it. They were eager to do it each day. The older boy is 12 and did Level E. It was too easy for him. I really hope that Spelling You See continues writing more levels. I would even purchase this for junior high and high school levels! Let them learn those difficult spelling words in context! The younger boy is 7, and I think Level D is a good level for him. He’ll continue using the books. My daughter who is 10 also did Level E. She did not like it, and complained about it almost every day. She felt like it was too “little kiddish.” I’m hoping she’ll come around, though, because I have already seen an improvement in her spelling.
See below one day’s work in Level E. Paragraph with chunking is on the left and copywork with chunking is on the right. (I received a PDF copy for this review, but they only sell soft-cover consumable books.)
The next picture shows an example from Level D.
Age Range:
These products are meant for elementary ages, or for remedial work for older students. See the website for placement help.
Related Posts:
- How to Teach Spelling to a Child with Dyslexia with “All About Spelling”
- The Best Language Arts Curriculum for Kids Who Hate Language Arts
- Curriculum Review: The Phonetic Zoo from IEW
(Disclosure: I received Spelling You See complimentary in order to review it honestly here. This post contains affiliate links.)
Hello there, I’m glad your 12 year old liked the spelling even though it was kiddish for him. I reviewed Level A. I want to get one of the Levels for my 11 year old…thinking of Level E for her. We too have done very little spelling. I started doing verbal quizzes because it was easier than doing a real test.