The Beginning of Communication
Equip your early learners to build words accurately and intentionally. Spelling 1 serves to help students develop foundational spelling skills and recognize spelling as a tool to honor God and to love and serve others through writing. This course endeavors to strengthen students’ knowledge of God, advocate that God created and uses written language, and apply spelling skills to produce accurate, God-honoring written communication.
How We Teach Spelling 1
Recognizing Patterns
The course material enables students to recognize common phonics patterns and structural generalizations. Students will encounter lists of words organized by similar characteristics such as rhyming words.
Evaluating Words
Throughout the academic year, the second day of every week involves a word study activity. Students will complete fill-in-the-blank activities with spelling words to see how those words are appropriately used in different contexts. Students will also develop proofreading skills throughout the course as they review their own sentences, checking spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. Dictionary skills are incorporated into nearly every lesson to teach students about alphabetical order, entry words, location skills, and word forms.
Expanding Vocabulary
The course uses activities which include high-frequency words, phonetic words, and words with irregular spellings to strengthen student skills. Handling commonly misspelled words, phonetic words, and challenging words help students develop a broad vocabulary.
Assessing Skill Level
Frequent assessments enable students to evaluate their own abilities and practice recalling words. These assessments also build student confidence and encourage mastery for producing God-honoring written communication. The first day of the week begins with a pretest on that week’s spelling words where the teacher will pronounce each word and use it accurately in a sentence. The third day of each week features a similar practice test, and the final day of each week determines whether students have mastered the words for that week.
Materials
Student Worktext
The student worktext contains grade-appropriate spelling lessons presented in thirty weekly lists. These lessons include phonics and structural generalization activities, word meaning activities, proofreading, and dictionary skills. The lesson pages also provide teacher-guided activities, and a spelling dictionary is provided in the back of the worktext.
Teacher Edition
The teacher edition coordinates all the instructional guidelines and activities for each lesson. Each of the thirty weekly spelling lists is presented as a five-day lesson sequence. The teacher edition enables teachers to guide students through understanding spelling patterns and rules, using words in context, proofreading, and using dictionary skills. The teacher edition also contains each lesson’s worktext pages along with the answers and a copy of the spelling dictionary from the back of the student worktext.
Spelling 1 is included in the first-grade language arts program along with Reading 1 and Phonics & English 1.
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