Product Description
The Traditional Spelling III Teacher Manual contains general lesson overview guidelines and a sample lesson plan. Each lesson features the inset of the student workbook, introduction, teaching overview, definitions, word study questions, and guided student work. The appendix contains a spelling test form, spelling review games, spelling rules reference sheets, common English contractions, and a phonics overview for the teacher.
What is special about Traditional Spelling?
- No incorrect words. Students are never given a list of incorrect spelling words and asked to choose the one that is spelled correctly. Incorrect words tend to confuse spellers who are working to master and remember correct spelling, and the visual of an incorrectly spelled word can stick with young readers.
- Color-coded phonograms. The main focus of each lesson is on the phonograms being taught, but all aspects of each word are addressed. In each lesson, students identify consonants and consonant teams/blends with one colored pencil, and vowels and vowel teams with another. This aids in visualization of each word and its phonetic chunks, and makes students better decoders as they begin to see patterns in words.
- Words in context. In addition to workbook activities, each lesson features a short story on the student’s reading level that utilizes that week’s spelling words.
- Sound dictation. Through oral dictation, students practice writing phonograms in isolation, words by themselves, and writing complete sentences containing select list words. These activities auditorily train students to hear phonetic differences and to visually highlight phonetic chunks.
- Vocabulary Building. Students get practice through workbook activities and scheduled skill-building activities with the various meanings of list words
Elizabeth Tso (verified owner) –
We have enjoyed all of the Spelling Books from Memoria Press. However, having a doctorate in linguistics, we do find that on occasion the phonics and grammatical explanations are awkward, or at times potentially incorrect. For example, in book 3 and 4, they teach a general rule for possessive nouns ending in /s/. However, different stylistic manuals teach different things. In our context, for example, if a noun ends in an /s/ and is singular, you still add apostrophe s [‘s]. Memoria Press teaches the opposite. It would be helpful to at least footnote somewhere that this is not a general overarching rule in all contexts. And, having taught at multiple universities in multiple countries, most writing courses would and manuals actually ask for ‘s. I have personally changed our books to reflect that. It would also be helpful for the spelling books to note that whilst they have categorised some phonics as having a certain sound, this also has variations across English dialects. But, overall, the materials are helpful and our children can apply the rules learnt in areas outside of the spelling book.