All About Spelling

I have a child that struggles with spelling. Now that was a bold confession! But seriously, it has been a cause of frustration for both of us, more so for myself I think, thanks to my English teacher in college. I can still hear his voice drumming in my ear. He was always annoyed with spelling and punctuation errors, which is completely understandable. But this has made me overly obsessive about my own writing: fear of making dreadful spelling or writing mistakes. I suppose that can be a good thing. The point is that we all want our children to do better than we did ourselves right? I know I can’t expect college level spelling or writing from my children right now. All I want is to see improvement. That is what causes the most frustration. We've been home schooling now for two years, and I haven't seen any improvement at all. The program we have been using is called Sequential Spelling. Here's how it works. There are 180 tests/lessons with 25 words for each test. The student has to do one test each day. The words usually start with a base word and build each day, for four days, by adding prefixes or suffixes. For example, fox, foxes, foxed, foxing. After four days, there is a new set of words that build. This method may work for children who can follow the patterns and know rules about spelling such as changing 'y' to an 'i' and add 'es'. For those who don't know a lot of the spelling rules, this can be difficult. While researching various programs, I came across All About Spelling. A friend had also told me that she uses that program and highly recommended it. After reading reviews and seeing such excitement about the program, I have decided to try it out. I’m very excited and can't wait to see results! What I like is that the program teaches the child why a word is spelled the way it is instead of the usual memorization list that most children get.