X-post: Spelling Workout B questions

[elise1mds]

I posted this on the curriculum board, but it's already buried with no answers. My soon-to-be 7-yo DS will be starting Spelling Workout B next week. Spelling Workout A has been pretty much a joke for him since he reads and spells very well. His downfall is handwriting. I was looking through the book when I got it today and realized that about halfway through the book, cursive is introduced and the three-line blanks with dashes turn into regular single-line blanks. I do not plan to start him in cursive for quite a while yet (his printing is still barely legible, but he is at least used to it), so I told him that the cursive words were just there to help him start to read cursive. He was okay with that. I'm more worried about the smaller boxes for the crosswords and the plain blanks.

Does anyone have experience with a dysgraphic child using this book? How did you handle it? I'm going to do a lot of oral work, but I do want him to do at least one page per lesson for the experience of handwritten work. Depending on the difficulty of the lesson for him, I'll cover it over a week.

Just an aside, he does LOVE the way the Spelling Workout books are set up, so I do not want to change the curriculum. He saw the cover tonight when I pulled the book out of the box and started singing and dancing happily around the living room, much to the amusement of my friend on the phone.

Thanks!

[Beth in OH]

I don't have a dysgraphic child, but I have used Spelling Workout. I think those workbooks are terrible for using good handwriting--line size, the pages don't lie flat due to the spine, tiny boxes for crosswords, etc. Perhaps you could have him do certain exercises on lined paper for practice. For example, the first page usually has students re-writing the words from the list under a restatement of the applicable spelling rule (or some such). You could write those rules on lined paper and have him do his writing there.

Beth

[Laurie]

My dd(12) has dysgraphia but for the most part she can write on the lines in the book. She still needs reminders to start writing where the blank line begins or she'll run out of space, and to try to "shrink" her writing because she tends to write big. It's been awhile since she was in book B but I'm pretty sure I did some of the crossword puzzle writing for her then. For the beginning books I used to write the list words on index cards to use as flashcards. If there were any activities in the workbook like alphabetizing I'd just let her organize the flashcards instead of writing the words.

I print the new word list in a spiral notebook and she copies the list at the beginning of the week. She reads cursive fairly well but still refers to the printed word list to complete the other exercises. We call her weekly spelling test a spelling bee since she does it orally.

[elise1mds]

Thanks for the tips! His handwriting is very large, so it sounds like I'll be setting up a spelling notebook for him, which probably isn't a bad idea anyway. I'm hoping we don't have to do every single lesson; that'll make life easier, too. I really like the "spelling bee" idea. He hates the thought of 'tests.'